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  • Tyranny of Dragons and Princes of the Apocalypse Review

    Fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons might be the best ever, but the release schedule is molasses slow. That's on purpose: fans have said they want it that way to give them time to develop their own campaigns.

    What's out so far, though is epic in scope. There's the two-volume Tyranny of Dragons comprised of Hoard of the Dragon Queen followed by Rise of Tiamat. Now we've got Princes of the Apocalypse. Both are full campaigns, starting at level one and going up to fifteen. 

    The similarities end there, however. In fact, these two adventures are fine examples of the two main, contrasting, approaches to adventure building.

    Tyranny of Dragons represents the classic way of doing things. It herds the players through a series of linked locations as they battle the latest machinations of the Cult of the Dragon in the Forgotten Realms.

    There's plenty of variety on offer. Some are classic dungeon crawls, others outdoor adventures. There are encounters based on pure role-playing and some that are little more than sequences of battles. The quality of individual chapters varies. But they all link together into a grand narrative, an epic sweep that groups are likely to remember for years to come.

    Although lacking a bit in imagination, it should be a great starting point for new groups. It covers a lot of the arch-typical encounter types and monsters that make D&D so beloved. There's lots of tips for the Dungeon Master including some "do this" or "read this" box-outs that might irritate more experienced players. 

    Against this, however, is the difficulty curve. It ramps up sharply after the opening chapters. Right until it gets to the point where the books end up advising the DM to be unafraid to kill players, since they ought to have access to Raise Dead spells. 

    Whatever magic they've got, frequent player death isn't something to be aiming for. On the flip side, you could always start this after running the Ruins of Phandelver from the starter set. The players would go in at fifth level, and you could tweak some early encounters. But the challenge level should feel less intimidating.

    It's also fond of railroading the players. Not in the awful way that the Dragonlance adventures did, but the more common "go here next because it's the plot". I imagine most groups, and especially new groups, will do just that without prompting. For those that don't, there's enough background information here for a good GM to wing it. Neophytes may find these departures a struggle.

    The adventure got a lot of criticism from seasoned gamers because of the railroads. Mostly, this is unfair. It's supposed to be suitable for players new to the game, where nudging players along a fixed path is a bonus rather than a boon. And besides, it's hard to write such a vast narrative sweep without keeping players on the rails a bit. That's the way campaign-level modules have always worked. 

    The alternative, a more free form romp through a detailed area with some sort of event timetable, is great in smaller adventures. But on the campaign scale, it'd be a nightmare to organise, right?

    Well, here's your chance to find out. Because that's pretty much what Princes of the Apocalypse is.

    Indeed, it's so fragmentary that it's worthy a look even if you've no intention of running the campaign. Almost all of its dungeons, towns and scripted encounters could be split out and dropped in to another campaign. They're detailed and self-contained enough to survive the transition.

    The adventure claims to have taken inspiration from the classic Temple of Elemental Evil campaign from first edition. In truth, the only relationship is the nature of the villains the players will be up against. And the adventure is all the better for it.

    The bulk of the book describes a series of locales in intricate detail. There's the towns and wilderness of the area where the plot is due to unfold. There are lots and lots of dungeons, filled with a staggering array of different traps and monsters. At times it feels like the designers were trying to cram the whole Monster Manual in here.

    This material is bookended with a description of the plot, and a chapter full of encounters for an enterprising DM to slot in anywhere for a change of pace. There's a neat gimmick to ensure the unfolding events keep pace with the players. Each "boss" they encounter has a several slightly different setups, which increase in difficulty depending on how many other big bads have already fallen.

    There's almost nothing not to love about this. It's bold, imaginative, unusual and well designed yet retains a solid grasp of what makes D&D the classic it is. The one problem is, as you might expect, that it's challenging to run well. The DM must digest this material in full if she's to avoid having to constantly reference the book, and to make the most of the opportunities offered by the modular structure.

    So, two adventures, two different approaches to adventure design. The first not entirely deserving of the criticism it got, the second perhaps not quite deserving of the level of praise it got. You pays your money, and takes your choice. But with the dearth of published material for the game, Princes of the Apocalypse has to be the better pick. It'll be more use for those trying to write and run their own campaigns. And as a standalone book, rather than a pair, it's a darn sight cheaper too.

  • Ubergames of 2006

    I decided to just make my own list.

  • Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype

    table gypeI should have a warning label or something:

    The surgeon general has determined that letting me review your crappy game can be bad for sales, not to mention what it will do to your ego.

    Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype is a good example of a game where the designer would have done well to read that warning label. Alas, he was inattentive, and apparently never read reviews of stuff I didn't like. Well, Uncle Chestnut, you probably should have done a little more homework. Table Gype is rife with examples of things that make me walk away in a hurry.

  • Undercover of the Knight: A Cover Your Kingdom Board Game Review

    A vicious, fun, mean, family game...kind of rolls off the tongue, huh?

  • Underleague Board Game Review

    Your stable is ready. You've chosen three creatures from your selection of 30. There are the Chill Wraith, the Stasis Golem and the Skinling. You know that some of them will lose and some will win, which is fine. In fact, it's what you're betting on happening, because if you win your bet, irrespective of whether the creature wins or loses, it will give you a strategic advantage in the next round of combat. You also have a few trumps up your sleeves. The Iron Tusks, which you have kept back for now, will make one of the creatures even stronger, and you have pulled some strings behind the scenes, so you know that you can fix one of the matches in your favour. You are confident that you will come out on top in Underleague by Cogwright Games.

  • Unheard in the Deluge: Cry Havoc

    An underappreciated DoaM game that is still well known by designers and aficionados.

  • Union Station Board Game Review

    It was a glorious time of progress, industry and opportunity. The turn of the 20th century promised so much and if you were flush with cash, there were plenty of opportunities to invest and reap huge rewards. That was especially true for the railroad industry in the United States. In one place alone, there were five companies working together to build the greatest station in the world. They all bought stock in one of the potentially most lucrative companies in Chicago. Their hopes and dreams all began at Union Station by Travis D. Hill from New Mill Industries.

  • Unlock! - A Creativity Quest Review

    Escape the Room is such a popular game concept that it's spilled over into almost every genre. You can escape rooms on computer, in a role-playing setting, even in real life. But it's never made much impact on the board game scene for a simple reason: it's mix of mystery and puzzling doesn't fit the format well.

  • Unmatched - A Five Second Board Game Review

    Unmatched first burrowed into my brain simply with its art.  I believe the publisher said they wanted every piece of art to be able to be a poster, and they pulled that off spectacularly.  So while I waited for the game, I made the quiet chant to myself over and over, “please don’t suck”.  

  • Up Above Down Under - A Wingspan: Oceania Board Game Expansion Review

    If you have read my review of Wingspan (which you can find here), you know I'm not what you would call a huge fan of the game. However, my wife Jessica ranks it as one of her top 5 games. As a result, I have played a lotof Wingspan. I don't have a problem with that at all. I glide through the game like a Condor riding the jet stream, adjusting ever so slightly for the occasional wind gusts the game blows my way....before descending in complete un-Condor like fashion during the final rounds to lay a metric shit ton of eggs. As such, when I was offered a chance to review the Wingspan: Oceania expansion, I flew at it. I know I am going to be playing Wingspan for the foreseeable future, so why not add something to it to see if it makes it a more rewarding experience?

  • Vast: a Creativity Quest Review

    Dungeon crawling is the most overworked, over-produced genre in all board gaming. Even more so than impressive Renaissance nobles. It was a surprise, then, to find  one mentioned over and over when I cast about for the most innovative games around. What  could Vast: The Crystal Caverns possibly  do to revitalise the most moribund group of games at all? The answer came as quite a shock, because it's not only new for dungeon games but  for board games in general.  

  • Vast: The Mysterious Manor is the Arthouse Dungeoncrawl - Review

    One of 2019's best and most compelling designs.

  • Vegas Showdown - Review

     

    vegas showdownI always wanted to own a hotel in Vegas. It would be totally awesome. The back rooms would be for rent, but you would have to be in some sort of organized crime to use them. The top two floors would be reserved solely for people who were hiring hookers. And every slot machine - and I mean every single one - would be rigged to never pay out more than a dollar at a time. I would be rich, at least until the gambling commission, the FBI or the vice squad took me down. Or, more likely, I would run the place into the ground, people would quit coming to my hotel, and it would end up a disgusting, run-down, flea-bag hotel that had to charge by the hour, and instead of high-class prostitutes and classy crooks, I would be overrun by crack whores and old ladies camping in front of the slots and chain-smoking for ten hours at a time.
  • Venture - Board Game Review

    I'm not in the habit of reviewing PDF products. For one thing, my printer blows through ink like a crack-head with an eight-ball, and nearly anything you download as a PDF is going to require like fifty pages, which means by the end, my printer will be spitting out blank pages. So I suppose I could take it to Kinkos, but then you still have to put it all together afterward, and now any savings you were hoping to score for buying an electronic game are chewed up in glue sticks and printing expenses. Plus, if your time is worth more than four bucks an hour, PDF games usually set you back a couple hundred dollars in lost wages.

    But then I saw Venture, and I knew that I was going to have to ask for a review copy, even though it was just going to be a download link. Hell, it's a dungeon crawl, and you can almost always sell me a dungeon crawl, even if I have to put the bastard together myself. Plus the art really sells it. Call me a snob if you want, but when a game has good art, it tells me that the publisher has put some effort into his product. Sure, there are ugly games that are fun, and pretty games that suck, but I like to think of those as statistical outliers. And when a game is a dungeon crawl, the art is especially important, because good art sells a theme better than the rules ever can.

    So I bit the bullet, got a copy of Venture, and printed it out. Then I built it. This was not a simple process, as there are what seems to be a completely unnecessary number of paper figures to assemble. I mean there are lots and lots of them. Which is cool, I guess, but after a while, you start to wonder if you're ever really going to need a dozen orcs. Most of the rooms aren't even big enough to hold that many. But I soldiered through and finished. I mounted the boards on foam core, and glued all the doors and figures together, and cut out all the cards and stuck them in sleeves. There's even a nice, big piece of cover art that you can put on a box to hold all this stuff (I bought a jigsaw puzzle at a thrift store, threw out the puzzle, and redecorated the box. It works great, but my garbage man probably thinks I totally suck at jigsaw puzzles).

    When the game was assembled, I was quite impressed with what I had built. The figures are pretty darn nice, for being paper miniatures. The boards are attractive and easy to play. The doors are cool, the cardstock furniture is swanky, and the cards all have pretty slick art. The rules are attractive, too, and they make sense right out of the gate. Combat and movement are simple, and most monsters are basically just collections of stats, which makes them pretty simple to set up and knock down.

    Which is, at first, exactly what you'll do. Most of the monsters are meant to be slightly more challenging than wet toilet paper. If they get super lucky, they might give you a black eye before they fall, but usually, they're really just there to wear you down a little before things get all gnarly - which they do when you finally find the big bad guy. Because then the mean ol' beastie can actually kill you, and if you're not careful, he does. Even the ogre in the introductory adventure can stomp a mudhole in at least one of the heroes before he goes down.

    Venture is not a cooperative game. I would say that the optimal player choice is two people, where one person runs the heroes and the other runs the bad guys. This is basically a HeroQuest clone, so one guy is doing everything he can to murderize a group of heroes, and the other player is tromping around performing unpleasant home invasions and stealing everything that isn't nailed down.

    A few elements of Venture were cooler than HeroQuest. For instance, the campaign mode allows players to get the sense that they're improving over time, as opposed to HeroQuest, where you're essentially stuck as first-level goobers and your only improvements are better weapons. Also, Venture's rooms and corridors open up a lot wider, which does away with the problem I always had in HeroQuest, where the barbarian can't get to the gargoyle because the dwarf is in the way, and the wizard is stuck next to the chaos knight because the elf has him boxed in. There's a lot more room to maneuver in Venture, which I personally find exceptionally refreshing.

    I also really liked the way the heroes get treasure, and how the bad guys get more powerful if the heroes dick around too much. Every now and then, the monster player will get to draw a card from the 'sweet powers for evil' deck, and this happens even more if the heroes drag their feet. Rush right for the bad guy, and you miss out on all the good treasure, but explore every corner, and the end boss is likely to get too tough to beat.

    Unfortunately, as pretty as my Venture game is now, it's still got nothing on the visual appeal of HeroQuest. I love those little plastic miniatures, and the dungeon decorations really add flavor, even if they do clutter up the board even more. Plus it's a lot easier to run a battle using plastic figures, because the paper minis have a tendency to scatter every time someone at the table exhales loudly. So if you buy Venture, consider not assembling the miniatures at all, and just use some D&D prepaints.

    Venture comes with enough adventures to keep you busy for a while, but if you like the game, you're going to run out eventually. But there's good news - the publisher has several free adventures available at the site, and even better, they've got an actual expansion cooking. Personally, I'm looking forward to it, and plan to buy it when it's available, and I plan to play all the free scenarios while I wait.

    Venture still has one huge hurdle to jump - you have to build it if you want it. I would be thrilled to pay a lot more for the same game full of plastic miniatures and premounted playing boards, but that's not likely to happen. There's a small company who will build you the game for another $65, but it's still not the same as having figures instead of paper standups. Still, if a download is the only way to get this easy-but-entertaining dungeon crawler, I'll suck it up and drain my printer.

    I just have to wait until payday. Ink cartridges aren't free.

    Summary

    2-5 players... but 2 is best

    Pros
    Super easy rules
    Still enough depth and dungeon crawl to be entertaining
    Very cool art
    Well supported with a good amount of expansion material

    Cons:
    You have to print it yourself - and then you have to build it
    Paper minis are a pain in my ass

    If you like dungeon crawl games, you're probably going to dig the hell out of Venture. If you're cool with building it yourself, you really should run over and get yourself a copy:
    http://0onegames.com/catalog/index.php?manufacturers_id=20

  • Victory Point Games Part 1- Multiplayer Games in Review

    Victory Point GamesAlan Emrich is doing something that I think is really kind of special. He's running a small games business and apparently doing extremely well since he was able to cut a $1000 royalty check to one of his designers. He's also teaching classes on game design and encouraging folks to get out there and make games, not just play them. And the games he's publishing are well worth your time and money, covering some unusual subject matter and providing some very fresh gameplay ideas that are sorely lacking in the "majors".

    In this article over at Gameshark, I'm reviewing three of VPG's multiplayer games- CIRCUS TRAIN (which Ubarose reviewed a while back and got me interested in), LOOT & SCOOT, and FORLORN: HOPE.  In a future column, I'm going to be covering a couple of their solitaire games including SOVIET DAWN, ZULUS ON THE RAMPARTS, TOE-TO-TOE NUK'LR COMBAT, and NEMO'S WAR. NEMO'S WAR is one of the best games of the year, it's _outstanding_ and hugely thematic.

    It really amazes me how much narrative, detail, historicity, and gameplay these guys are packing into really small footprints. TOE TO TOE has like 20 counters and it feels more thematic than games I've paid five times as much for and that have hundreds more components.

    They've got a new one out that I wish that I could have covered, it's called FINAL FRONTIER and it's very obviously a Star Trek game. It looks fun. Anybody play it yet?

  • Victory Point Games Solitaire Titles in Review

    Captain Nemo Pictured is James Mason as Captain Nemo. He's PISSED. That is a stern look of disapproval if ever I saw one.

    Why is "Jehmz Mehhhzohn" pissed? Because you're not playing NEMO'S WAR enough. It's one of the best games of 2010, and it along with PHANTOM LEADER rank as two of the very best solitaire games I've ever played. So quit laying out four character, one player games of ARKHAM HORROR that take all day to set up, play, and put away and give the ol' Nautilus a whirl. I think you'll be surprised at how much game this inexpensive, low profile game will give you. And the them is BAD ASS.

    This week at Cracked LCD I'm looking at NEMO'S WAR along with three other Victory Point Games solitaire titles. They're all really good ones. That's seven total games that I've covered from their catalog, and I have yet to play a bad one. Can't wait to see what these guys do next.

  • Viktory II Review

    Here's a great user-submitted review that personifies Fortress: Ameritrash--shining a spotlight on a game that might not have received the attention it deserved.   Thanks, Norman!  --Ken B.

     

    Viktory II is a game for two to eight players with a Napoleonic feel played on a modular map which is random every game.  The rules are reasonably simple and reward aggressive play.  The game features exploration, economics, player elimination, combined arms tactics and dice resolved combat.  Typically a game will feature 3 to 5 turns of exploration & building before players begin to interact & compete for resources.  Our games with four players usually finish in a single session of  3-5 hours.  Read on for more information and a description of gameplay.

  • Villainous... But Worse (Better!) - Villainous: Wicked to the Core Review

    More doesn't always mean better, but this time it really does.
  • WAR FOR EDADH review, plus MEGACORPS from Z-Man!

    faction_dzaa.jpg
  • War For Edadh, or Let's Pick a Number Between 1 and 12

    warforedadh2Before WAR FOR EDADH's many supporters immediately jump down my throat and tell me there's more to it than picking a number between 1 and 12, just hear me out. I know there is. But as far as an actual game goes, that's allthere is.