Cthulhu Dice... driving people insane one roll at a time!

Cthulhu Dice

This is a REALLY short game! Consisting of a single oversized D12 featuring Cthulhu Mythos symbols and a handful of glass pebbles you would be easily forgiven for overlooking this game as more a novelty item and less a game.

I would be lying if I said there was anything resembling strategy to this game but the simplicity is half of the fun and it makes a useful five minute filler game whether you are waiting for dinner, for a bus or the men in white coats coming to return you to Arkham!

 

My rule sheet is a little tattered as it features as a regular filler for us!

Gameplay

The rules are straight forward and you only need reference them once or twice until the icons are learned…..

Players begin with three of the glass markers. These are Sanity Tokens.

Each turn you choose a victim from among the other players and roll the die applying the result to their chosen player:

Yellow Sign = Your target loses one sanity to Cthulhu and pushes it to the centre of the table.

Tentacle = The caster takes one sanity from his/her victim unless they are already insane themselves in which case it goes to Cthulhu.

Elder Sign = You gain one sanity from Cthulhu’s pool in the middle of the table.

Cthulhu = EVERYONE loses one sanity.

Eye = Players choice from the above.

Once this is resolved, the victim immediately retaliates by rolling the die and applying the result to their attacker then play moves to the left and the next player chooses a victim, and so on.

One interesting element of play in this game is that if you lose all of your sanity you are NOT out of the game, instead you are merely insane! A gibbering maniacal servant of Cthulhu. When the turn comes back around you may attack anyone as usual, but you may not be attacked in retaliation, nor can anyone choose you as a victim. You may become sane again by rolling an Elder Sign to reclaim some of your marbles from the mighty Cthulhu but with the odds at 1 in 12 this is a slim chance and more often than not the game ends with you, mad as a sack of badgers, causing all kinds of grief for the remaining sane players until only one remains (in this game the Elder Gods seem to follow the Highlander rules!)

The game takes between five and ten minutes for a full group of six players and I would say that you should only play if you have four or five people as it doesn’t play well with less.

For a quick distraction and a mainly thinking free game to kill a few minutes this is worth the £5 price tag. I will give Cthulhu Dice 6/10, It is a really simple little game and there isn’t much to it, but it is still a fun little addition to a collection.

Kill Doctor Lucky..... Killing pensioners with your friends!!!

Kill Doctor Lucky

From the outset the art on this game is a big draw. The image on the box lid is fantastic and humorous and a good indication of the rest of the game.
The instructions are simple enough to understand and easy to follow, it took only a couple of turns for everyone to decide that the rules can be put away!
The board isn’t among the best quality boards I own due to some warping out of the box but the art on it is very good, the room images are well presented and a good size which accommodates up to the maximum amount of players in any one room at the same time.

The pawns are card standees with images of the would be murderers on them as well as one featuring the ill fated doctor and his little dog Shamrock, and they feature a semi cartoony image of each of them brandishing their weapon of choice. The maid wields her broom as if she held a warhammer, the military gentleman hefts his service revolver as if waiting for the hapless pensioner to wander into view. They are made of a nice thick card, the same used for the spite tokens, which themselves hold an image of the good doctor looking rather worried. These standees fit snugly into plastic stands which are a decent size and don’t increase the overall size of the standees, it can be irritating when the stands are so big as to hamper the placing of pieces on the board.

Finally, my personal favourite part of the package, the cards. The quality is some of the better I’ve seen even if the static from the wrapping kept the cards clumping together until they had been vigorously shuffled once or twice. The images on the cards are in keeping with the rest of the artwork. The weapon/murder cards feature a simple picture of the weapon at hand and the murder score and any bonuses are clearly printed, as some weapons are better when used in certain rooms. The location cards simply have an image of the room and instructions to move either yourself or doctor Lucky there and the movement cards have the number of spaces it affords you/the doctor printed on them. The best cards are the failure cards, played to prevent the other would-be murderers from offing your target before you. The images are usually of one of the characters looking angry or the doctor looking worried/smug/confused. The humour is in the text. From discovering that your weapon is in fact a useless banana, the doctor disappearing in a cloud of feathers up to a mysterious kung fu master randomly appearing and saving the doctor at the last second. These make for an amusing game of positioning yourself for a good kill while robbing your opponents of victory with a well timed random event.

The only down side to these wonderful cards is that after a few games and a few more shuffles the plastic coating has begun to fray at the edges of one or two which makes wanting to play with them conflict with my OCD habit of trying to keep everything pristine.

Gameplay.

The objective of the game, as the title suggests is to Kill Doctor Lucky. In order to do this you must maneuver yourself and sometimes the Doc himself into a position where you cannot be seen from any adjoining rooms or corridors, and use your cards to try and snuff the codger out.
In our first game the first couple of turns were a tentative affair of moving around the board, picking up a few more cards, which you do by only moving one space and no other actions on that turn, and working out how to make your move against the Doctor who wanders around a predictable path through his house. It wasn’t until the first attempt on his life that the game showed its true colours.
If you have a group with an imagination and especially one with a knack for storytelling, then the act of ruining someone’s carefully planned execution with a series of random and ridiculous events becomes a treat for the whole group.
Listening to your friend describe how you discover your gun is actually a banana which you eat and discard the skin, only to slip on said skin and fall down a hidden trapdoor can only bring a chuckle to all and the combinations only get weirder.

Each time you are foiled in your scheme you receive a spite token, which grants +1 to any future attempts. When these build up and you are attacking the doctor with a stronger attempt on his life your fellow murderers have to do their best to stop you and combine their failures and the combinations of events that befall you become nothing but ridiculous!

The game is fun for a good sized group but I can see how a maximum of 5 makes for a better game, having 6 or 7 players would make getting the doc alone and unseen all but impossible and would make the game drag on too long. As it is a 5 person game lasts 45-60 minutes and is very enjoyable.

I would recommend this game to all but the hardcore gaming groups as the slightly casual nature of the game would not suit all comers. It makes an ideal introductory game for themed board games and newcomers can pick up the rules in a very short time.

The first time I reviewed this game sometime last year I gave it 8/10 and to be honest, if I weighed it against other games of a similar casual nature I will stand by it. It’s quite a cheap pick up at around £20 so if you are stuck for a new game for your group and you enjoy a dose of daftness in an evening you could do much worse than to give this one a go.

Talisman.... Roll, move, obey.

TALISMAN.... now with added relative!

For a game that was first released in 1983 Fantasy Flight have done a good job of keeping it fresh, and before anyone gets all uppity I know just as much credit for this edition is due to Black Industries so leave the pitchforks alone for now!
The box art is very evocative and suits the game inside perfectly and the box is sturdy and well made, as are most FF games (as I keep saying in my reviews, I may stop one day!).

 The board is MAHOOSIVE! That was the first thing I thought when unfolding it, it just kept going! We have a limited space for gaming and the board takes up almost all of it. Add one of the corner expansions such as the dungeon and we have a slight overhang. The spaces on it are clearly marked and decorated with an assortment of well drawn and thematic images. It is divided into three regions, the outer, which is the easy road and where you start, the middle region which is slightly harder but offers more chances to either gain strength and skill or die in equal measure. Finally the inner region, which has to be taken one space at a time until you reach the crown of command, at the very centre, and make a play for the win.

 

One MAHOOSIVE board

Now with added brother arm for scaling purposes!

The rules are well presented and easily understood, so much so that my entire gaming circle had them learned by heart by the end of the premier game. The cards, of which there are many, are well done with art of an equal quality to the rulebook and the rules and events described on them are easily read and understood. My only issue is the size of the cards. Having rather large hands I find the act of shuffling a deck of 100+ half sized adventure cards, with more to add with each expansion, is a taxing affair at the best of times! The spell cards and purchase deck are the same size and equally good and the fate tokens, simply decorated card discs, are thick and sturdy and will stand up to much passing from player to spare pile each game.

After the card board components we get to the plastic components. Starting with the 120 player counters, 40 red for strength bonuses, 40 green for health points and 40 blue for craft (magic!), these small plastic cones stack beside the players’ character card to show current health and any strength or craft bonuses they have earned so far.
The money earned in the game is represented by small plastic coins, which is a nice touch as most would simply opt for punched card coins such as in Descent V1.0 (I hate that game!)

Finally we get to the miniatures, which is the biggest update FFG made as the Black Industries version had card standees. These are very good, the scale is such that a full six players can stand on any one space with little to no overlap and are all easily distinguished from one another while playing. The sculpt quality is good considering the scale and the only issue I had was that the plastic is a little soft so thin sections, such as extended swords or staffs, can be bent while packed in the box so a little check is always needed when packing away to check for possible casualties. The character cards that reference the player pieces are clearly printed and easy to reference, the character portraits on them are not as good as the rest of the art in the box however so someone dropped a ball there I think!

Before play I would give the components 8/10, some small issues but nothing to damage a score too much, some parts could be better and the issue with the small cards is purely down to my dinner plate hands so there’s nothing I could do about that one!!!

Gameplay.
Before I go on I need to make one thing abundantly clear.
If you are looking for an RPG style board game with plenty of strategy and decision making, where deals are made and people broken, look elsewhere, this game is not for you and if you still want to read on you’ll see why!

These are some great feeling dice

The core game mechanic is simple.
Roll the die
Move that many spaces
Do what the board or cards tell you
Rinse and repeat until you can make a break for the win!!!
The only kind of strategy or decisions you make throughout a game are whether to go left or right and finally, when you thing you are strong enough to handle it, when to make a move into the inner regions of the board and make a break for the crown of command, where you roll a die to see if you cast a spell, the only action you can take there, and if so everybody loses a life. Do this until everyone is dead and you win! Simple!

It’s not big (that’s a lie it’s bloody enormous really), it’s not clever but it is good. The randomness of the game will turn some players off but for those groups with slightly more casual members this game is a good one as the ease of play suits almost anyone.

After play the score I give is 7/10, the simple roll, move, obey sometimes leaves me wanting a little more but it is still a very enjoyable game and we still play regularly.

One thing in closing, if you are going to venture into the world of Talisman and drop some of your hard earned currency of choice in a retailers hands for an expansion or two (there are currently eight to choose from) then some form of storage solution is needed to reduce box rummaging. I would recommend fishing tackle boxes as a cheap option unless you want to create something more elaborate. It serves us well enough for now.

Sorry I've been away for a while, I have been suffering from 'Exploded Computer Syndrome'. I aim to be back to a regular posting schedule sometime in the coming week!

Gloom - Kill yourself happy!

Gloom

To say I was expecting a slightly larger package when I ordered Gloom I was pleasantly surprised when the small box plopped onto the mat below my letter box! The packaging itself is very well presented, using a black, white and red colour scheme the mood for the game is set before you even open it up and get into the unique cards within. The blurb on the back sets the scene for the game with a brief gameplay rundown below a banner stating “The sky is gray, The tea is cold, And a new tragedy lies around every corner…”

The rules for the game are printed on a rather flimsy piece of paper but are easily readable and are just as easily understood as the gameplay mechanic is a simple one.

The cards are BEAUTIFUL!!!

The four unfortunate families

Modifier cards

They are printed on clear plastic and printed on both sides so you can hold them up to the light with little to no distortion from the image on the rear of the card. Each of the family members are accompanied by an amusingly dark piece of text about themselves and a black and white portrait of them on a colour coded background for each family. Each family has five members and the draw deck is comprised of 58 modifier cards, which can be either negative which is good for you or positive which is bad for your opponents, 12 event cards which act as single use effect cards to either give yourself the edge or severely hamper an opponents strategy, and 20 untimely death cards which are the most important cards in the game as you need these to bump off your thoroughly depressed family members in order to score points at the end of the game. The main objective of the game is to make your family as miserable as possible using the modifier cards, with such unfortunate events as being “sickened by salmon” or being “chastised by the church, and all the time attempting to cheer up your competitors families by making them fall in love or becoming popular with parliament! 

Mr Giggles, the creepiest card I own, and that's quite an achievement!

When your family members are suitably depressed you can play an untimely death card and aid them in shuffling off their mortal coil in as unappealing manner as possible.
Once one family is entirely dead the game ends and the player with the unhappiest dead family wins the game, those members still alive do not count.

.....But now he's dead (again)

The game has a very simple mechanic to follow making it an easy one to pick up for players of any skill level. Each player has a hand of five cards and each turn they may play or discard two cards with the exception that an untimely death card may only be played as the first, ensuring people don’t depress then immediately kill their characters. After a player has played their cards they draw back up their hand size (some cards increase or reduce the hand size) Some cards have continuous effects as long as they are on your family members but it never gets over complicated and most games are over well within the average 60 minutes given.


One of the greatest elements of this game is the story telling. It’s infectious! We found that even staunch refusers of roleplay were crafting tales of woe for their poor families which branched with each soul crushing event that befell them, and adding to the tales of other families with a delightfully whimsical tone as a wonderful event cheers up an opponents character, with a saccharin sweet smile and evil intentions all the way!

This game is a treat for any table and no matter who plays they will be hooked before the end!
9/10 I would have given this game a 10 if not for the smell of the plastic cards upon opening dissolving my eyebrows. The new plastic smell dissipated within minutes but the memory of the odourful punch in the nose is one that stayed!!!!!

Hey, That's my fish!

Hey, That’s my fish, Fantasy Flight edition.

Light, that’s the first word that springs to mind. For a box almost as big as the Talisman box there is a distinct lack of weight! The reason for this shall soon become apparent.

The artwork on the box is well done and in keeping with the humorous nature of the game within and the usual FFG vinyl effect is present too giving the box a good sturdy feel.

When opening the box the reason for the weight issue become apparent, FFG seem to be shipping fresh air around in their boxes! The contents would easily fit inside a box half the size, if not smaller, the card insert to hold the components takes up more room than they do! But this is only a minor quibble (if a daft one).

This box contains more air than anything else!

The rules are simple and well presented on a double sided page explaining the easy, but addictive, game format of move, take fish, win game. Bonus points there for not using an unnecessary amount of paper for such a simple concept unlike some games companies.

The ice flow tiles are of the same sturdy vinyl effect card as the box so they will stand up to a lot of play without damage.

The penguins themselves are brilliant! Quite small but well sculpted, molded in an assortment of amusing poses (my favourite being the one raging into the sky!)

All four colours with one of each pose.

The tile layout before a game.

Gameplay.

The game is simplicity itself to play and takes seconds to set up, in fact it took me longer to get the box open than it did to set the first game up!

You begin by placing one of your penguins on a tile with one fish on it, the next player does so too and so on until all players have done so and this is repeated until all penguins have been placed.

On your turn you can move any one of your penguins across the ice flows, taking the tile you were stood on with you and removing it from play. You move in straight lines and your progress can only be barred by other penguins or missing tiles.

The main strategy involved is placement of your penguins. Trying not to end up trapped in a corner where your opponents can remove a tile or two and cast you adrift from the board, at which time you are considered eaten by killer whales!, but aligning yourself to do the exact same thing to everyone else while taking as many high scoring fish tiles as possible.

The rules are so simple that a full group of four were taught the rules before turn two of the first game and were penguin strategists extraordinaire by the third. It makes a great casual filler game for a busy game day and breaks up those times between big box games nicely. The penguin playing pieces are a nice touch and the tile quality adds to this.

A four player game about to kick off!

I’ll give this game 9/10 as a casual game alone as if I compared it to most of my other games it would have a much lower score. Great as an introductory game and fantastic if you want a litre of American factory air as a bonus!

A fantastic way to spend ten minutes or many hours afloat on the ice and I would recommend this to any and all as a brilliant and inexpensive game for all tastes, from the hardcore to the casual.

Bonus game tip: removing tiles that are surrounded can easily disturb the neighboring tiles and ruin a game by forcing you to constantly rebuild sections of the board. To prevent this I recommend using Nerf darts, the ones with suction cup ends, as you can simply prod and lift a tile without upsetting the play area at all.

Smallworld.... it's a world of (s)laughter after all!

Smallworld – Tabletop genocide for all the family!

Starting with the box alone the visual appeal of this game is evident from the beginning. The artwork on the box has a humorous and cartoon-esque appearance and is very well done, The overview of the game from the back of the box is sufficient to give a good sense of the game without spoiling too much before opening.

Opening the box presents you, firstly, with a couple of leaflets from the lovely Days of Wonder peeps showing some of their other products and then below these we get to the first of the main components, the instructions. The perfect length and well presented, there is no overcomplicating of the rules which are not hard to grasp at all. There are race and power reference pages and even a diagram showing the best way to organise the plethora of tokens which lay below. Here also are five reference sheets which show turn order on one side and race/power effects on the other, my only gripe is that these are HUGE, they are almost the same width as the box itself and if all five players requested to have one, which is unlikely thankfully, then they take up more space than the board itself and my gaming table ain’t that big chaps and chapettes!

Skipping over the tokens, which are next and require popping from their frames, we find the boards. The two and three player double sided board is a single fold affair with fewer spaces for the two player side and the same for the double fold board for four and five player games. The art on them is really nice, colourful and the spaces are clearly different from each other with any icons or markers easily distinguished from one another. Both boards are of a high quality, much better than some I own but I have seen one or two better.

Both boards are double sided for  2,3,4 and 5 players

At the bottom of the box is a two part compartmentalised tray for token storage, one part of which is a removable tray which holds the players race tokens for easy access throughout the game without having to have the box at hand.

The tray holds all of the race tokens and gives easy access to them during play,.

.....and here they be.......aaaaarrrrrr!

The trays are a necessity with Smallworld as the token count is among the most impressive I have seen. I am among those sick people who enjoy popping tokens and counters from their frames and this game was guilty of feeding that habit! There are LOADS!!! (that’s right, three exclamation marks, count ‘em) the tokens easily account for more than half the weight of the game and they are gorgeous, the artwork is extremely well done with the same humorous theme held throughout the game and they have a reassuringly sturdy feel to them even down to the noise they emit when dropped on to the board, I know it’s sad but it really is a satisfying noise!

The components alone are begging for a perfect ten and I had to really struggle to find a point to mark it down. In the end I had to settle for one minor gripe in that I would have preferred the reinforcement die to be made of plastic as the wooden one feels a little cheap compared to the beautiful bits it finds itself surrounded by (it must feel a little depressed when it considers this fact!)

9/10

Gameplay

Simplicity thy name is Smallworld!

This game is so easy to learn that my entire gaming circle had it down by the end of turn one, even my eight year old son had it learned after a couple of turns and the boy can barely concentrate on staying upright half the time!

On the first turn players select a race and an accompanying bonus trait from the selection randomly generated, paying one coin for each after the first in order (i.e. if you select the third race in the queue you must place one coin on the first and second races as payment, which anyone choosing those races gets to keep as a bonus) and take the required amount of race tokens as determined by the numbers on the race and bonus cards, for example Sorcerers (5) and Merchants (2) gives the player 7 sorcerer tokens to use. These tokens are used to claim regions on the board/map which cost 2 tokens to claim and an additional token for each enemy token, lost tribe tokens (who are placed on the board at the start of the game as remnants of the prior settlers of the region), mountain, fortress (placed by a race with the special bonus to do so) encampments or Troll lairs.

At the end of the turn the player may reorganise their tokens to better defend their frontiers and all regions owned by the player will earn then one gold, plus any bonuses earned by any special rules.

Each player continues in this manner until they are unable to continue with their current race, either through losses in battle (you lose one token for each of your regions taken by other players) or by having spread so far that you cannot expand any more. At this time you may put your race into decline, at which time they are flipped over and no longer active pieces, merely remnants of former glories, and then choose a new race from those available and continue anew on the next turn.

This continues for a set amount of turns, as allocated by the turn tracker on the board, until the final turn when the winner is determined by the number of gold coins earned.

When played with four or five players this game shines in a class all of its own, It has all of the subtle tactics and vicious backstabbing that any gamer could ever want. The joy in seeing someone take a gamble and gain control of several regions only to have the next player ruthlessly annihilate them is a joy not seen in games of a similar nature. It also helps that the random combinations of race and power means that the backstabbing often leads to a revenge play happening sooner rather than later and you never know what combo will be next from the pile. This fact also helps with the replay value. Because the races and powers are drawn from randomised piles each game you will not see the same pair drawn very often and therefore, peoples choices will differ from game to game based on their preference and the choices of other players.

The gameplay is brilliant and I can’t wait to add some of the expansions to it if only for the new races!

9/10 (that dice dammit!)