A relatively novel idea with an overused setting that can't escape the seemingly rote gameplay.

Back in the days before Space Hulk was common as muck, gamers spent a lot of time and energy discussing possible replacements. Claustrophobia was a game that got mentioned a lot in those conversations, and I never understood why. Not because it was a bad title, but because it shares almost nothing with Space Hulk other than asymmetry, a collection of finely sculpted figures and some six-sided dice.

Brad and Ömer review the new historical/fantasy miniatures game "Of Gods and Mortals".

I love me some Vlaada Chvatil. I delight in his imagination and skill in welding together unlikely elements to create brilliant games. He likes pushing dexterity into unlikely place. Or adding depth of strategy to genres and mechanics that have not, traditionally, had much. So it came as something of a surprise to find that his latest game, Codenames, is a simple party game.

Except, of course, this is Vlaada Chvatil. And that means appearances can be deceptive.

The little box is full of double-sided cards printed with single words. Lay twenty five of them out in a five by five grid and divide the players into two teams, each one of which has a spymaster. He knows which eight of those cards will score his team points if they can find them, but he can't just say which they are. Instead he can only give a one word clue. One word to bring them all. One word to bind them. One word to hopefully indicate as many cards as he can in one go.

It's easiest to explain with an example. In one game, where I was the spymaster, among the cards my team had to guess were "vet", "teacher", "agent", "spy" and "fireman". So I said "jobs, five", with the number indicating how many cards my clue pertains to. Otherwise, had my spies gone over and started guessing the wrong names they'd be handing points to the other team. Or, worse, picking out the hidden assassin card for an instant loss.

One word, five cards. Easy, right? Well, you'd think so. But I've given you a poor example in the interests of quickly illustrating what the game is about. Because the reality is that the game is often fiendishly hard. Fiendishly, brow-sweatingly, terrifyingly hard. In my experience finding a single word to tie two cards together is a tough ask. Three is a minor miracle. That five was a one-off, and we won.

What makes it all the more difficult is that if your team picks a word belonging to the opposing crew, you're hit with a double whammy. Your turn ends and the opposition gets a bonus point. So you must never, ever give a clue that might indicate one of their cards or, worse, the assassin. Easy enough in theory. In practice this is almost impossible. 

Say you've got "apple", "sink" and "cook" down. Great, that's three food-related cards in one go. But there's also "oil" down there, tagged as an enemy agent. How on earth can you come up with something to link there first three without also risking your team picking the latter too?

These conundrums drive the game. It doesn't help that your team will instantly turn into dunderheads when you're the spymaster. Suddenly unable to pick up on even the easiest of your subtle lexical allusions. It can also be slow to try and think of the best clues. There's an egg timer in the box for good reason.

It's rare that you can really learn something from a game, let alone one this simple. Yet Codenames illustrates with dreadful ease the vast chasms that exist between the words we speak to one another. The huge gulfs of misunderstanding and confusion into which we often stumble at great cost to our relationships and our jobs. Playing Codenames will make you a better, clearer communicator. That's a great reason to play it.

Another great reason is that it has vast appeal across groups of gamers and non-gamers alike. That's because it relies on concepts of language that everyone understands, yet is a real struggle to play well, . It doesn't even have to be played competitively. With less than four players there's a co-op variant where you play against the clock, but it upscales to more players perfectly well. You can take it anywhere, play it with anyone, which is a brilliant trait in a party game likely to be owned by gaming geeks.

The one problem that you might find with it goes back to my original example. Remember how I said the four was a one-off? I got that because I was lucky enough to have four cards with a very clear association between them. When I've managed to get threes, it's been the same: down as much to luck and skill. So the difficulty level in the game is very unpredictable. That in itself wouldn't be an issue except, depending on how the cards fall, it might be that one team has a much easier grid of clues than the other.

It happens more often than you'd want. But on the other hand games only last about fifteen  minutes so if you get a one-sided game you just flip the double-sided cards cards and try again. You'll want to, and so will all the other players too.

Who knows. Maybe it's just lack of skill that stops me from getting two cards to a clue without a lot of luck. Perhaps I'd better play another game to practice and find out. Perhaps I'd better play another ten.

Looking forward to a nice two player night with my favourite gaming crony, Graham. I've packed beers, printed play aids, read the rules - twice - and I'm about to leave. The phone rings.

"Matt? It's Graham. I've got a house full of teenagers. Bring some multi-player games. And some more beer."

I'm in a rush, so I grab the first thing in front of me. It's Colt Express. I got it on a whim to play with my daughter.  I mean: it's cheap, it's got a cool 3d train and it won the Spiel des Jahres. What could go wrong? Well, as it turns out, what went wrong is that it's pretty poor with two. So it seems a good excuse to run the locomotive out again.

I might as well get this out of the way right now: I’ve never played Bioshock Infinite. I got about an hour into the original Bioshock, but from everything I can see Infinite is an altogether different beast. I don’t know my Booker from my Handyman. But I defy anyone to look at the production of Plaid Hat’s new board game adaptation and not be at least a little excited about playing it. It’s the sort of game where seeing it all laid out on the table makes me salivate with anticipation. I have no idea if fans of the video game have the same experience, because The Siege of Columbia takes a curious left-turn in its board game form. Rather than trying to recreate the experience of the video game, it creates a completely different experience set in the same world. It’s a well-designed piece of territorial conquest for two players. I’m just not convinced it needed the license in the first place.

When you're ankle-deep in streamlined, strategic board games from the European school of worthy but tedious game design, it's easy to forget sometimes that part of what makes gaming great is the feeling of being there. C&C:A might be a bunch of cards and wooden blocks, but when it works you're not sat at a 20th century table any more: you're Scipio on the dusty plain at Zama, Hannibal on the gore-soaked field of Cannae.

I forgot this whenever I used to talk about the C&C:A expansions. Spoiled by the mechanical contrivances added to their respecting games by the expansion boxes for Memoir 44 and C&C:N, I played them and airily dismissed them as not adding sufficient extra strategy or interest to the game in comparison.

It's an assessment I stand by, in some respects. Given that almost every other expansion to almost every other C&C game has added sets of units which behave in some significantly different way to their base-game counterparts, the piecemeal extras in C&C:A seem a missed opportunity.

But what I'd been doing was playing from a position of ignorance. When I originally played these games, I knew very little about ancient warfare. Enough to appreciate that C&C:A does a fine job of replicating what little we know about the tactics and strategy of the era off some relatively simple rules. But not much at all about the battles themselves.

Then I went away and atoned for my ignorance by reading a book called Warfare in the Classical World by John Warry. And I remembered. I remembered how incredible it was that puny Greece had twice defeated the might of the Perian empire. I remembered how astonishing the tactical genius of Alexander was. I remembered how these battles, these generals, did so much to shape the modern world.

And suddenly, I wanted to play the Greek expansions for C&C:A again.

So here we are, many games later, having re-assessed some of the more intriguing battles with a little more knowledge of history. It makes all the difference. While I still find the added units and scenarios a little weak from a mechanical point of view, an understanding of the history made the games come to life as never before. Quite suddenly, I saw where the value was in these expansions: a straightforward way to game some fascinating battles with a great system.

In most respects, the recently re-issued expansion #1 is the better of the two. It spans a greater depth of history, from the Greek and Persian wars to the ascent of Rome and most of the scenarios are well worth playing, making it of interest and value to almost anyone with a passing interest in pre-Roman history.

One peculiarity of this reprint is that the blocks used for the Persian forces are different from the original printing, being plain wood grain instead of painted tan. This makes no difference to the expansion by itself, but if you own expansion #6 as well, which has a few extra Persian blocks in it, they won't match up. Your irritation factor will be roughly equal to your anal retentive rating.

On paper, you'd probably find the history contained in expansion #6, the Spartan Army, to be the more engaging of the two. I certainly did, at least. This is where you'll find famous encounters like Platea, and the legendary last stand of Leonidas at Thermopylae. Whatever merits the 300 board game might boast, it's nothing compared with slapping down the cards, rolling the icon-embossed dice and shouting "SPARTAAAA!!!" in the two Thermopylae scenarios included.

But while the big battles are well worth playing, all of the scenarios focus very heavily on infantry. You'd kind of expect that, from what we know of the Peloponnesian Wars and the other military encounters between the early Greek city states, but in game terms it starts to feel a little one-dimensional.

The game tries to improve things with a new unit type, the Hoplite, but they're really just standard medium infantry that can also utilise mounted command cards, a choice forced on the designer by a lack of cavalry in many of the scenarios. It works up to a point, but things do get a little repetitive after a while.

But I still reckon it's worth it. Just for "SPARTAAA!!!"

One of the great joys of these expansions for me was simply the variety of history they cover, drawing in battles I'd read about but which were virtually un-gameable outside of miniatures rules. The fact they were using the excellent C&C:A system was just a bonus. Fans of the game who just want extra scenarios might want to wait for the other upcoming expansion reprints, or download some from the web. But if you just want to re-live the glories of ancient Greece, there are few better all-in-one packages than these.

Britain is pockmarked with standing stones. On a recent holiday we passed them in a dozen different sites. High on windy hillsides or perched above rocky bays, the waves seething over jagged rocks beneath. I love to touch them, to touch my history. They feel like the bones of the country, smooth yet pitted. 

If you google Commands and Colors, you’ll get a startling array of results all of which are connected to a simple game system for modelling warfare that’s become so wildly popular with board gamers that it’s spawned a mass of iterations across historical and even fantastical settings. However, ask most experienced gamers what the best of these titles is and they’ll tell you it’s Commands & Colors: Ancients from GMT games, which deals for the most part with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. That publisher recently sent me a big box of various Commands & Colors material for review and, given that an iOS implementation is due from Playdek sometime this year, Ancients seemed a good place to start.

On rare occasion, I’m inspired to write another review of a game that I’ve already reviewed elsewhere. Such is the case today when I’m going to be taking a fresh look at Commands & Colors: Ancientslargely because my original review was scarily obsessive about looking at its relative merits as a consim rather than by looking at whether it was actually any fun or not. And I’m going to start by pointing out that GMT really need to hire another copy-editor since their existing one has shamelessly left the “u” out of Colours, not only in the first printing but in every edition thereafter! How shoddy is that?

There is something utterly vulgar about an artist reviewing his own work, but anyhow. Here goes nothing.

History starts at home. So when I began to dig into the past, I did so first in Britain and then in Europe. The remote, surf-swept volcanic islands of the Pacific seemed a long way away, even when our Imperial past reached out to them. Even when I watched Bridge on the River Kwai and read Helmet for My Pillow. Terrible things happened there. Terrible yet important things but they were too far away to touch me.

Introduction

Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy other people to shoot at. - Anonymous

I'm not a tactical wargamer. They never seem to strike the balance between rules complexity/playability correctly while maintaining decent realism. In strategic level games, a little abstraction in the name of playability is fine with me. For some reason, it really bothers me when it comes to tactical games, which is one reason I have stayed away from them. I desperately WANTED to like a tactical WWII game, but so far one just hasn't really caught me.

So my buddy Travisshows up at game night with Conflict of Heroes, made by a german guy from South America, who apparently thinks the nazis and communists are heroes. Draw your own conclusions about that.

Apparently you can teach the game in ten minutes, the scenarios are under two hours, it will support 2-4 players, and there is no downtime- you can react to everything your opponent does. At this point, I figured that Trav was full of shit and this was some sort of evil trick to get me to play some new Caylus expansion... I had recently played Pillars of the Earth Expansion with Travis, and I will never forgive him until the day I die. My children will hold a grudge against his children for that abomination.

I mean, no downtime? Playable under two hours? Sign me up, but color me skeptical. Of course, it did look good.

I’d always wondered why Wizards of the Coast bowed out of the board game market, but when they came back to it, they came back with a vengance. First they redefined the dungeon crawl genre for the better with the amazing Adventure System games Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon. Now, following on in the great tradition of adopting RPG licences for popular game styles there’s a multi-player conflict game out set in the D&D universe, Conquest of Nerath. Given my immense enthusiasm for the Adventure System titles, I was straight on to Wizards when I heard about this for a review copy, and to my delight, they sent me one.

Cosmic Encounter was one of the first hobby board games I owned, back when I was a teenager. It was the Games Workshop edition. I can still remember being baffled by the rules. It looked and smelled like a conquest game: there were battles and alliances and units died. But what the hell kind of conquest game made you draw and card to determine your target instead of you picking on the weakest player? Where was the fun in that?

An overdesigned, overwrought mess.

I am the type of gamer who desires depth, not breadth. I'd rather play one game fifty times, than play fifty games one time each. A standard such as that requires a game that can hold up to fifty plays. Quite frankly, that is a rare case. This hobby is littered with the flotsam and jetsam of games that held up for five plays and were then traded away to someone else so that THEY could play it five times and trade it away. We tend to call any game a "classic" if it is pretty good (and sometimes when it isn't). It can be easy to forget that there is no such thing as an "instant classic." The only thing that can create a classic is time, and games that stand the test of time are the ones that get played over and over again. These are the games that get whole websites devoted to strategy, that reside in hallowed places on our game shelf in battered boxes, with grubby cards and tape along the edges. They may fall out of print, but they are never forgotten.

This weekend, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s thriller from 2011, Contagion. I’m not entirely sure what I was suspecting, but I liked what I saw. I found it to be a clear-eyed portrayal of what a true global pandemic would look like, without apocolyptic overtones and overwrought doomsaying. It was simply about a very serious global scare and the aftermath, and that straightforward quality suited the subject matter well. In some ways, it felt more realistic and therefore more frightening. But the whole time, I was remembering back to the movie’s release, when my wife pestered me to go and see “that Pandemic movie.”

Dungeon! Rules!

Here it is, my long-delayed review of _all_ of Small Box Games' "Pure Card" line.  These games are all designed and published by John Clowdus, a guy that come to find out lives just about 30 minutes away from me. So yeah, full disclaimer, I've met and played games with him. I've even watched him down a bottle of Evan Williams and rhapsodize about the film ANGELA'S ASHES and fabricate a story about some house in Atlanta that had bleeding walls. He's a good guy though.

These games are exactly the kinds of games I've been looking for lately, and it's very refreshing to come across a designer that is doing simple yet innovative and completely unique games that aren't copies of other games. It really says a lot that John is more versed in MAGIC than he is in who won the past ten Spiel Des Jahres, and that his goal isn't to do these huge, epic and epically expensive games but to do compact, fairly minimalist designs with limited components and low price points. But they're also not bullshit games without any context, meaning, or theme- the games all speak to thematic material surprisingly well, with virtually no executive theme other than pictures. And the themes are unique, too. Check out WAX and POTLATCH in particular. 

 I'm thrilled to pieces to have discovered these games, and I've been excited to be able to share them with you guys. It started out that I was just going to do two or three of them, but when John gave me copies of the entire line and I played through each of them, I realized that I had a Cracked LCD Countdown in it since there were ten titles. There's only one that I think is kind of a non-starter, and one is really more for young children, but I still thought they were worth checking out.