All the dice...half the excitement.

When I write about older games I try to find one that a lot of people have played, or maybe one that could be considered a classic. By that standard, Felix: The Cat In The Sack seems awfully slight. It’s a little 30-minute trifle by Friedemann Friese, who is much better known for his bigger designs like Power Grid. It was well-regarded when it came out several years ago, but like a lot of minor hits from that time period it’s been passed by in an age of deckbuilders and crowdfunding. Still it’s proven to be something of a gem in my collection, a short auction game that felt unique at the time and still does. And more than most games, it makes me laugh.

It is fairly rare that I review games anymore, even rarer that I beg a company to see if they have a review copy.

I did, and the game is Catacombs.

Shellie emailed me a little while ago and said "OMG, have you died? Where is Cracked LCD?". And then she threatened to fire me. The truth is, Bill Abner is completely AWOL, I think he just got a review code for Shogun 2 and as such my four-in-one review of some new Victory Point Games is languishing on his desk. Or I think he might be travelling. So, while you bide your time wondering how much I really didn't like Parsec, here's some stuff from Nohighscores.com you might like.

As lord of the Abyss and Master of inappropriate Capitalization, I vow to bring death and madness to all who would deny the Pure awesomeness of Cave Evil, where death rules and evil also Rules. Those who would refuse to dive into the well of Pustulent disease and play Cave Evil have failed to appease the dark overlord of Darkest darkness and will be condemned to listen to Justin Bieber and bad hip hop while we revel in the pure unadulterated Evil of our twisted master.

Talk about bucking the system - I'm over here at a site about American-style games, and I'm getting all ready to review a game so European, it has a snooty accent and smokes filterless cigarettes. But it's fun, so what the hell.

The recent announcement of the completion of the Century trilogy in Golem form had me returning to this gorgeous production and I was impressed with how much play this still has to it.  

As soon as I see the box, I want it. Even after all these years of gaming, the evocative pull of good box art is still capable of stirring me, deep in my wallet. And when it comes, before I take the shrinkwrap off, I spend a moment admiring it. Looking at the golem's inscrutable face, its vast scale compared to the tiny caravans, wondering what it's doing with that tree.

Viking stuff.

While The Dark Mountains expansion extends the current game with more players and new challenges to defeat, the Valhalla expansion adds new mechanics in the form of a new resource to manage, secondary leader abilities, and leader dice which join on the battlefield. Now when your warriors die in battle, they help you by gaining favor in Valhalla. Will you use your fallen warriors to defeat the epic monsters or will you gain favor with the Valkyrie and receive their help in the form of blessings, artifacts, and powerful berserkers and shield warriors?

You shall ride eternal, shiny, and chrome!

"From the fires of Betrayal unto the blood of revenge we bringthe name of Lorgar, the Bearer of the Word, the favored Son of Chaos,all praise be given to him. From those that would not heed we offerpraise to those who do, that they might turn their gaze our way andgift us with the Boon of Pain, to turn the Galaxy red with the blood,and feed the hunger of the Gods."

-Excerpt From the 341st Book of Epistles of Lorgar

A couple of months ago, Gameshark.com editor-in-chief Bill Abner said "no Barnes, I want to do the CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD    review".  This was back when I was a doubter and I thought the game was going to be another also-ran in a year with too many also-rans.  So instead, I reviewed garbage like WORLD WAR IV and pissed everybody off with articles such as "The Ceiling" while we all waited for Abner's take on the game. Earlier this week, Bill asked me to finally write it up since he's been preoccupied with other matters and hasn't had a chance to play it in a while, let alone spill out a thousand words or so about it. So I took up the banner, and I give you the Gameshark.com review of CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD.

Now, a couple of weeks back our very own Steve "I liek boob&bomb" Avery commented that he was "disappointed" in the game. Well Steve,  I'm disappointed in you. CitOW is the best game of the year, hands down. Robert Florence, in his podcast, called it (quote) "the best game [he's] ever played". That's a little hyperbolic, but I understand the sentiment because the game is just flat out awesome from concept to mechanics. Is it an thinking man's ass-kicking game, or an ass-kicking man's thinking game? IT IS BOTH.

So, if you buy only one game this year, blah blah, make it this one.

And, FYI, I did not recieve a promo copy of the game from FFG. In fact, I don't even own it at all. Santa Claus, come in, can you read me?

I have been reviewing games for a long enough time that I can usually spot a really bad game just by looking at the box. I am rarely surprised, though Cambridge Games Factory surprised me routinely by having ugly games that were actually really good. Chaostle, on the other hand, did not surprise me. The art would be good, if this were 1986. The box is absurdly huge. The components are almost painfully obvious for being pointlessly excessive. These are all neon signs that add up to 'you will probably not enjoy this game.'

I'm not normally a fan of cheese in my games. I kind of like my games to be like the cheese shop in that Monty Python sketch - you know, completely uncontaminated by cheese. Tight design, efficient rules, and a damned good reason for every part in the box - these are marks of a good game. Using those criteria, Defenders of the Realm should be a failure.

Somehow, though - and I don't know that I could say how - it's not. In fact, it's an extremely fun game, complete with Stilton, Camembert and Limburger, and maybe a little Venezuelan Beaver cheese. It's a cooperative game designed using almost all the same ideas you see in Pandemic, but where Pandemic is efficient to the point of feeling sterile, Defenders of the Realm is campy, almost sloppy.

Better than classic.

When I first played Churchill I was in the middle of reading a book about Stalin. The moustachioed mass-murderer who killed twenty million of his own people. "I'm not playing Stalin," I muttered as I wrestled to unfold the board. "I'll be Churchill, or Roosevelt, but Stalin was just a bastard." Then the board popped flat with that famous moustache and paranoid smirk right where I was sat. Sometimes, you can't argue with fate.

That first game was a Kafkaesque nightmare of which Stalin would have approved. The title simulates the conferences between the allied powers of World War 2 which shaped the post-war world. Players pick political issues to debate. Then they try to win them by playing numerical cards representing historic diplomats. Winning issues allows you to influence the course of the war which, in turn, earns you victory points. The game isn't hard to learn. And you can play it in under three hours. What's difficult is that you win points two steps away from your actual decision making.

Afterwards we sat, sweaty and dishevelled, in a nest of discard chits and beer bottles like the aftermath of some nerdy ménage à trois. We weren't exactly sure how we'd got to where we were, but the journey had been thrilling. The earth had moved for us all.

At first, Churchill felt like a puzzle box in the form of a game. We understood the rules. All we had to do was figure out the best strategies for putting decisions in to get points out. The trouble is that whenever you push a button or a lever on the box, the results happen somewhere else entirely. It's fascinating, intricate and addictive. Like every geek presented with a conundrum, we were full of fire to work it out. 

So we reconvened a second session. This time, we knew what to expect. This time, we were going to pull all the right levers and push all the right buttons. This time, we were going to play this as the serious, intense strategy game for grown-ups it was obviously intended to be.

That lasted one turn before we decided it was far more fun to talk smack instead. As a game about debates, Churchill demands that you rain insults on your opponents with every card. Both Roosevelt and I and noticed in the first game that spreading political influence was a good route to points. Every time he chose a Political issue, I debated him. Debating is a way of stymieing other player's moves and it's what the Russians do best. "You Commie fuck. Why not debate the British?" he shouted, knowing full well I wouldn't. "Why do you keep picking the issues I need?" I countered, knowing full well he'd carry on.

Of course the end result was a British victory. But that made us notice something else. The UK and US earn most of their points together, because they had joint investment in armies and the A-bomb. So tiny things like whether Italy or Normandy get invaded first can determine which of the two gets the edge. The Russians are rubbish at winning conferences so they have to grub for points doing grunt work. Getting spies into Eastern Europe and the Manhattan Project. Defeating the Nazis. That sort of thing.

There are some other oddities about winning. If the lead player wins by too much, then the second-place player gets the victory. The rules say this is to simulate one ally becoming too dominant and having the other two conspire against them in the post-war world. I wanted to understand this, and the other historical nuances of the victory conditions, better. 

Churchill is at its best with three players. With less, one or more positions get controlled by a flowchart of decisions. So I had a go at playing with myself. That is, I took Stalin again and used the flowcharts for the UK and US to play a game and see if I could figure out the history. And, secretly, I was hoping for clues to help me solve the puzzle box better, faster than my friends.

The flowcharts are no replacement for a human player. They don't offer the satisfaction of reacting angrily to your merciless gloating, for one thing. For another, while they're effective at playing their own country they care far less about winning the war. In that solo game, for the first time, I changed the course of history for the worst. I invaded Germany, but Japan still stood proud and undefeated.

It felt like a loss. It kind of was a loss. It's clear that players should work together to beat the Axis powers as well as working against each other to win. Otherwise a winner gets determined partly at random, by adding or subtracting a die of victory points. The practical reason for this is to stop a lagging player deliberately collapsing the game into a group loss. It feels contrived but it does function as a spur for the players to co-operate just enough to win the war.

Armed with this new knowledge, we tried again. And this time, finally, things began to click. Instead of mere trash talk, we were badgering each other to gain an edge. Roosevelt and Churchill were pleading with me to open a front against Japan, because it's hard to win the war without it. In turn, I used that leverage to insist on finishing off the Germans first. It wasn't just trading insults any more. It felt like a real debate, political brinksmanship over the fate of cardboard Europe.

We started paying attention to what the diplomat cards in our hands actually did. Each has a special ability which works in conjunction with particular kinds of issue. So picking conference issues became a balance between what you actually needed to debate and what you can do so most effectively. Exactly the sort of problems which face genuine diplomats to this day.

Once understood, you begin to see these trade-offs everywhere in the game. You accumulate political power only at the expense of military power. You put issues up for debate at the risk of someone else stealing them. Some of the aged and most experienced diplomats carry the risk of dying if you use them.

This is the framework for that fiendish puzzle box. Slide away one section and see if you can solve it for yourself. Try it again the next game and someone will push the other way to see if they can beat you. As you learn to unlock each layer, there are fresh ones beneath to explore, each more intricate than the last. You can even start to manipulate those victory conditions. In one game, as Britain pulled ahead, the US and Russia conspired to fund their armies and feed them victory points. They won so many that the second-place player clause kicked in and the USSR took a deserved win.

Fittingly for a history game, Churchill feels like it belongs to a different time. We play in an era of fast-food titles. Cheap to buy, easy to learn, addictive to play and then just as easy to throw in the cupboard and move on. Churchill, by contrast, takes as long to appreciate as the entire shelf lives of some of its peers. It is not as clumsy or as random as your average family game. A more elegant title, for a more civilized age.

Roll up! Roll up for the greatest show on earth! Who doesn’t love a circus? Well, now you get the chance to run your own in Circus Train. Not in the modern day, of course, with its annoying animal welfare laws and societal distaste for freak-show exhibits, but in depression-era America.

This is the second edition of this game. Both it and the original were published by the delightfully cheapskate yet innovative Victory Point Games. Except you wouldn’t know it if this was your first VPG title. In place of the flimsy counters and paper map of the original you’ve now got a mounted jigsaw board and chunky counters. They’re laser cut, so be prepared to wipe a lot of soot off your fingers for the first few games, but they’re worth it for the bargain basement price.

The new edition also includes the expansion set from the original, meaning you can play with up to five and add a bunch of new acts to your big top. But the most impressive update for me is the art. Everything is wonderfully evocative of its setting, from the sepia-tinted calendar that serves as a turn track, to the combination of big-show and typewriter fonts used throughout the production.

So it looks great for the price. How does it play? Not quite as you might imagine from looking at the box. You might reasonably expect a richly thematic laugh-a-minute recreation of circus life, but what you get is a medium-weight strategy game with some tough decisions. Not that there isn’t some cracking flavour baked in to the rules, what with the event cards and the fact everyone starts in Canada to stock up on booze before touring the bone-dry states.

Once you’ve read the rules, and understood this is a moderately meaty game, you’ll probably be imagining a typical modern strategy title with fairly limited interaction. There’s clear mention that one of the actions you can take allows you to steal performers from other unfortunate circuses on the same space, but that’s your lot.

Except it isn’t. When you actually play the game, it becomes clear that this is actually a nasty, vicious, cutthroat exercise in every sense. While there might only be one action to steal things directly from other players, the whole game revolves around getting to stuff on the board like unemployed clowns or pent up demand for entertainment before anyone else does, claiming it from right under their noses and, ideally, laughing maniacally at their bad timing while thumbing your nose.

To rub salt into their wounds, the most common thing that you’ll be claiming is the chance to put on a show and earn money, which leaves them bereft of not only points but income. And early on everyone will realise that they need to be just as wary of the game itself as they do the other players when they’re forced to pay wages and find that the pittance they’d earned so far won’t cover the bill and all their performers leave in high dudgeon.

And so everyone will end up limping across the Midwest, scrabbling in the ashes of other failed circuses for talent to put on a show and get back on track. Except, of course, that means all the players desperately homing in on the same location and hoping their depleted hand of action cards have the right combinations of moves to get them there first.

At this point, two things will happen. First, the player who claims the prize and the player who almost got there will exchange regrettable and bitter insults, and possibly blows. Second, everyone will realise that had they played better during the opening turns in the game, none of them need be in this position. And then then game is well and truly on.

It’s a mystery to me why this game isn’t better regarded. When I got swept away by the first wave of German import board games I had this peculiar vision that what I’d get was a tide of easily learned, fast playing games which were nevertheless strategically demanding and full of interaction. What I got mostly were bland, empty shells of games, bereft of  thrills and drama. Circus Train is the sort of game I was expecting, except it turned up a decade too late.

One possible critique is that the feeling of weight and depth is partly illusory. Different show demands reward players depending on what acts they have to please the audience, and are drawn and placed randomly from a bag each turn. So if you’re lucky enough to be near a city that’s baying for whatever artistry you specialize in, you’ll put on a great show. But the scoring mechanic, which feeds in drips and drabs from a variety of sources, does its best to level things out and, one or two screwy games aside, mostly succeeds.

However that maddeningly slow infusion of precious points does also mean that the victor can become predictable. Without the opportunity to score some spectacular points bonanzas, a significant lead opened up in the mid-game can be hard to catch, even with everyone striving to viciously peg the leader back whenever possible.

But here’s the thing. I saw that situation arise a couple of times when playing Circus Train and both times everyone round the table remarked on it, and both times precisely no-one cared. Everyone was too busy humming big-top music, settling their most pressing vendettas and grudges from earlier in the game and just trying their hardest to put on the greatest show on earth. No-one cared how it ended because they were just too busy having a grand old time.

In many respects, it’s harder to praise a game more than that. Circus Train has flaws and it won’t be hitting my gaming table every week. But with solo rules that’ll really teach you how badly the game punishes economic mismanagement, and an advanced variant that adds a little more strategy and a lot more flavour, it's streets ahead of many more professionally produced games, and a definite keeper.

Zombie board games tend to focus, like the films they emulate, on the players surviving by putting up barricades and beating the undead to death with whatever they can find. But if you’ve seen enough horror movies you’ll know there’s a second string, a darker theme where cooperative groups mercilessly pick the weakest member to sacrifice to the shambling hordes so that the others might survive. That’s the grim base on which City of Horror rests.

And grim is the word. There are few games more callous than this. It’s not a game to play with relative strangers. It’s not even a game to play with friends that you can’t rely on not to hold grudges. Players control a variety of characters, spread around a zombie-infested city. Each turn there is a vote in each board area that’s accumulated sufficient zombies. Each character in that area gets to vote for who dies, and the character with the most gets eaten. Gone. No second chances, no dice, nothing. Eliminated.

There’s something refreshing about the brutal purity with which the game approaches death. But it also creates an instant rich get richer problem. Once a character dies, the owning player has less characters on the board, and so less votes, which makes it slightly harder for them to keep their other characters alive. You can always play the sympathy card to try and avoid being tossed to the ghouls but the mechanics encourage picking on the weakest. It’s been my experience that players tend to lose all their characters, or hardly any.

So the answer is to try other approaches to negotiation and trading. This is where the meat of the game is to be found. There’s a lot you can trade: promises, which may be kept or broken of course, but also material. Food is worth bonus points. Zombie plague antidotes are required to score points for any surviving characters, their precise value being dependent on whether they’ve used their special ability or not. And every player has a hand of action cards.

These action cards and, to a lesser extent, the abilities of the characters, are the primary way players exercise control over the whims of fate in the game. Many kill zombies, or allow you to move them to other locations, some at a cost of making areas of the board unstable to the point of eventual demolition, resulting in further carnage. Others allow you to sidestep the gruesome result of the voting process and other, more minor effects. They can be discarded in certain locations in exchange for beneficial effects.

They’re incredibly useful, and the urge to play them is constant. You only have five, used over four rounds each of which will see several votes. New ones appear on locations occasionally, along with other resources, which are distributed amongst characters there based on another vote, but they’re pretty rare. This sets up a situation in which the choice of whether to play an action card or keep it should create delicious tension.

Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s just plain frustrating. The cards are basically your most precious resource and are wonderful negotiating tools. But there’s no way of knowing whether it’s sensible to save them. play them or trade them. The game just doesn’t give you enough information to plan a meaningful strategy with the cards. And once they’re exhausted, the otherwise compelling negotiation loses some of its spice.

You may have noticed by now that although voting to distribute resources seems fairly realistic, voting to see who gets eaten isn’t. In practice the strong and the fast would have a considerable upper hand. So the mechanical link with the theme falls apart. There’s plenty of quality zombie art to compensate but sadly the card it’s printed on is rather lower quality, warping and splitting with worrying ease. There’s a lot of it too since the game uses cardboard standee figures rather than miniatures.

And without the theme you begin to see that underneath all that gory art, City of Horror is just another twist on the classic cut-throat negotiation game, exemplified by Lifeboats, Intrigue and I’m the Boss. None of those games does much better at presenting a theme than City of Horror does, but they don’t particularly pretend to do otherwise. They’re also a lot simpler and more direct than their undead relative. And, crucially, it’s debatable how much extra game the added baggage in the newer title creates.

We’ve already seen how the voting mechanic leads to a rich get richer problem, and how the use of cards as both currency in deals and board effects backfires. The value of the food and location effects varies tremendously from game to game. The ability you have to move one character each turn from one location to another is unthematic and, since selections are made in secret, basically random. What’s left is the character powers, the fact that using them reduces their score, and the need to collect antidote to score your survivors. That does add a fair amount of interest, but it just ends up compensating for the dead-weight rules.

Not that the game is overly complex. As is often the case with European games iconography has been used heavily to keep things language independent and as is often the case with iconography it’s largely confusing and impenetrable. But that’s a fairly minor annoyance. The game is also fast playing, taking sixty to ninety minutes to complete and that’s a poweful saving grace. You don’t mind too much if your characters start ending up as zombie chow and your game slowly falls apart when you know there’s an end and a re-rack within sight.

City of Horror is not, on the whole, a bad game. I’ve had more fun with it than the tone of this review may suggest. Its collection of mechanical niggles and rather blunderbuss approach to adding new and mostly ineffectual twists and theme to a classic genre are counterbalanced by its sheer, overwhelming nastiness. It’s not often that a game allows you to be quite so delightfully mean to the other players, and that’s something to be savoured. But ultimately while it’s likely to provide considerable amusement for a few games, it has issues enough to ensure either a limited shelf-life or only occasional table time. And in a crowded marketplace and a well-worn genre, that doesn’t quite cut the mustard.