A board game idea - "hotel"

So the idea of this game is for a two or three player game that I know I will not have time to develop, unless someone wants to pay me to do it of course.

Players take the role of a general dogsbody in a hotel. If a guest needs a pillow you get it, If a room has a water leak, you fix it etc etc.

The board is made up of a cutaway profile of the hotel with three or four rooms per level. A stairwell and elevator give access to the various guest levels from the lobby, which is where the players avatars start. Carefully secreted around the hotel are special rooms that supply the things your avatar might need, such as pillows and blankets in the linen closet, tools in the basement and so on.

Each turn cards are draw from a deck of cards, perhaps one per player. Each card has a guests "need" that the avatars must fulfill. The "need" might be an extra pillow, fixing a water leak, coffee, whatever, and each card has an associated tip that the avatar will get for providing the need. The card is placed on the board in a room space.


To fulfill a "need" the avatar must be moved to the location that has the required item, such as pillows from the linen closet, and then moved to the room that has the need. The player then takes the card.

Tips can be spent to purchase upgrades to the avatar, such as roller skates that allow them to move quicker. At the end of the game the player with the highest amount of unspent tips will win.

Another feature of this unfinished idea includes take-that upgrades, that allow you to slow your opponents by setting banana skin traps, locking the supply room etc.

Well, that's the idea. Unfinished, unpolished. Now it's out of my head, hopefully I'll be able to sleep tonight

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Leg End Mary: Encounters

I just published a free to download print and play game based around The Princess Bride. Details on one of my other blogs....

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Solitaire play throiugh of Memoir '44, Montelimar

Another of my solo plays of Memoir 44. Not many left in the base game, then I'll have to move onto the scenarios in the expansions...

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Space Hero Memoir 40K : Actual Play

 Here's an actual play of the game I presented in my last post. A mashup of Memoir '44, Space Crusade and Heroscape.

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Space Hero Memoir 40K

 I was looking at my collection the other night when it occurred to me there was a natural mash up just waiting to happen, so I went ahead and did it.

Here's the game set up for the first play-through...

As you can tell, all you need to play this game is Space Crusade, Heroscape Master Set: Rise of the Valkyrie (maybe two sets if you want four walls like me), and Memoir '44.

The idea was for the Emperor's best to find the Artefact Glyph and take it off board. Alas the forces of Chaos were to intervene.

After the first turn, the yellow squad were already in trouble, with chaos marines kicking their butt.

Sadly for the "good" guys things went from bad to worse very quickly, although they did take out the Dreadnought very easily.

It went very well considering I spent all of ten minutes working out stats.

The following stats are :

Move spaces, Melee Attack Dice, Range, Ranged Attack Dice, Defence Dice, Area Effect

Standard Marine 3,3,5,3,3
Close Combat Marine 3,5,2,2,3
Hvy Weap Marine 2,3,5,4,3,Yes
Ork 3,2,6,3,2
Gretchin 2,1,5,1,1
Android 3,3,6,3,3
Dreadnought 2,3,5,5,5,Yes
Genestealer 3,5,0,0,3

Moving onto higher terrain does not cost move points but you can only climb one level for each hex moved. When shooting at a lower target range is +1.

Players each get four cards in hand and can play one per turn and draw a replacement at the end of their turn.

All moves are completed before combat.

The Memoir cards in use are restricted to the following: Attack, Recon, Assault, Probe, General Advance, Recon in force, Pincer move, Counter attack, Direct from HQ, Firefight, Ambush

Area effect weapons hit the target hex, and one adjacent hex. Both hexs must be in line of sight (although you don't have to hit two if you don't want to. You make separate rolls for each hex. You can not target an empty hex you have to target an enemy.

Next time I might add in the Devastators from Space Hulk... or maybe the Ninja from duck! duck! Go!...maybe not that last one. 

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Skylanders as a boardgame

My son has been collecting the Skylanders figures for quite some time, and I love the look of these

things, I've wanted to come up with a board game for them for the longest time. Well I finally pulled

Sample card

my finger out and started what promises to be a long term project.

The card image on the right is my first stab at creating a character card for the game. What follows are my first thoughts about the game rules. These are not finalised, not even play tested, just the results of a brain-dump.

The playing surface needs to be a 6cm grid to fit the figure bases, perhaps with stand up terrain in some squares to block line of sight and add interest.

• The "Allies" in the top right corner might say anything and indicates some kind of affiliation.
• The 1 in the orange circle is the cost to "buy" the figure into your army, a process done before game play starts, players take alternate turns buying figures up to an agreed amount.
• The text at the bottom is usually flavour text, but may describe a special in-game ability.
• The stats in the blue box are, Melee Attack dice, Defence dice, Range of attacks, Health.
• Melee attack into adjacent boxes, roll 1 D6 for each Melee Attack point, all 5s and 6s count as hits.
• Defence, used when attacked, roll 1 D6 for each Defence point, all 5s and 6s block one incoming attack point.
• Range, this indicates the range over which you may make attacks, Ranged attack are different to Melee. They can not be made into adjacent squares (that would be melee). The Ranged value indicates the number of dice you attack with, but reduces with each square of range between attacker and target.
• The Health number, indicate how many points of damage you can take before the character is killed (removed from the game).
• All figures may move 2 squares.
• Blood tokens will be placed on a characters card to indicate hits.
• The board will be sprinkled with 3D "crates". Moving into a square allows the character to pick up the crate. Each crate may be burned (discarded) when the players wants, to do one of the following things. Heal one point, move two additional spaces, add two to Range, Melee, or Defence score for one turn.
• There may be terrain effects, such as height or cover.

Well that's all my thoughts from a first session of brain storming. There are a lot of possible additions to such a simple system but to be honest, I want it kept simple.

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Solitaire Memoir '44 Sword Beach

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Solitaire "Memoir '44" Pegasus Bridge

Here's me playing Memoir '44 by myself and only making half a dozen mistakes.

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

What would you do? Memoir 44

Here's a quick video asking a question about Memoir 44. What card would you play and which units would you activate?

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Axis & Allies: Battle of the Bulge, solitaire

A cinematograph in which I speak forth on the subject of solitaire play with the above mentioned game.

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Getting the Ogre out

 Tonight I finally got round to playing the pocket edition of Ogre. Here's the set up.

Look at that innocent looking little fellow at the bottom of the map. Almost cute! He's not though. he crawled up the map edging a little to the right and started blowing away my guys like they were popcorn. The infantry on the left got left behind the first line of infantry were run down. The tanks behind them put up a bit of a fight, some even being disabled but they ultimately couldn't do much.

I managed to slow but never stopped the beast. I concentrated on taking out treads rather than weapons, hoping to get a win by stopping it before it could get in range of the CP, but I just couldn't inflict enough hits. This may be all down to my bad initial placement. As you can see from the picture above, I set up too far up the board. I didn't appreciate how little terrain actually effects the game and tried to put my troops in "safety". What I should have done was set the troops as far down the board as possible and moved forwards to engage the beast as soon as I could. Time is everything when you're shooting treads!

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

How to play Hour of Glory solitaire

Hour of Glory is a great WWII sneak-em-up game that pits the heroes against the Germans and the clock. Normally a  game for 2-4, here's how to play on your own.

I'm an author, I write adventure game books.

Playing Zooloretto solitaire

It's a little known secret but you can play Zooloretto on your own, singular-mode, Titus Onyourownicus, solitaire. In this video I show you how.

Solo rules for "Ticket To Ride"

I've had Ticket to Ride for a few years now, and have pondered the possibilities of solo play on many occasions, but only today did I put in the effort to actually get a working set of rules changes going.

I've played the following through and it works quite nicely.

The first thing to say is that this is a true solitaire rule-set, you play to see how high a score you can get, rather than playing against dummy players controlled by an A.I. Having said that, you will be playing against the game, as you  would in a cooperative game.  The challenge gets harder over time as you try to improve on your previous best.

Choose a colour to play with, any colour but black. We'll be using black to block routes as the game progresses.

Set the game out as normal.
Draw three tickets. You must keep these!
Draw two train cards to start off your hand.

Now, you start alternating turns, first you, then the game, then you, then the game and so on.

On your turn you can draw train cards or tickets or play trains as normal.

All double routes are active, but you may only use one, as per the normal rules.

On the games turn you draw a ticket. Find the shortest path between the destinations. Now place "one" black train on one of the route segments along that shortest route. You can not place black trains on both parts of a double route.  If the shortest route is occupied by either your trains or the black trains, find the next shortest route between the two points (even if it shares some of the same route) and play a train to block that route.In this way, every time the game "plays", it will block a route.

After you've played the black train discard the ticket. If you run out of tickets, shuffle the discards into a new draw pile. Likewise when ever you want to draw a new ticket you should shuffle the discards back into the draw pile first.

Continue playing until either your supply of trains gets to three or less, or the supply of black trains reaches three.

There is no bonus for the longest train. Instead you get a 10pt bonus if all of the destinations on your tickets are joined together in any way.

That's it. Nice and simple.

Target! Bearing 093 degrees!

I designed and released a card game called "Target! Bearing 093 degrees!" back in 2011 and its been on sale at WargameVault.com since then. Its only in the last week that I noticed that the people at WargameVault have stated that products with an associated video sell better than those without. So with that in mind, I've thrown together the following video promotion for the game.
Enjoy ... consume ... buy ....

Golo - a review of a Golf-dice-game

I saw this for 1.99 in my local corner store I would have passed it by as another piece of junk-ware-shelf-filler but caught sight of a D12 in the bottom. I checked it out and low and behold it had nine D12 in there. My first thought was that 1.99 was great for 9D12, so if nothing else it was worth picking up for that. Actually it turns out the D12s are not normal D12s, so it might not be worth it.

When I got home I pulled it open expecting the worst of Christmas junk-gaming. Not so. inside the plastic tube was a nice golfing score page and a dinky little pencil, quality stuff! The rules appear on the score pad so I was good to go...but wait!

There is also a little cardboard rule book, that repeats the rules and adds in a few pointless optional rules. Pointless to a gamer that is, but I expect a few after-christmas-dinner players will like to try them out.

I was blown away by the quality of the dice cup. Thick plasic, mug-sized and lined inside. I'd be happy with the price just for the cup!

Then onto the dice. Nine engraved dice in three colours. Two red for Par 3 holes, five white for par 4 holes and two red for par 5's. These are not numbered like ordinary dice. For instance a white dice has three number 4's and ranges from 3-8. It's a similar story for the other dice too.

The "par" numbers on each die are surrounded by a square and the 1-under by a circle.

Game play is Yahtzee style. Roll all the dice, lock one or more, roll the rest and keep going until you've rolled and locked them all. Then allocate the dice to the appropriate holes on your score pad.

You do this once for the first nine holes, and then again for the way back to the club house. Add up your final score.

That's it. Simple. Multi player solitaire if you have friends over, or a quick diversion if you're on your own.

Considering the price, I'm really happy with it. A quick round of golf on your table and an excellent dice cup!



Found in "It's a Gift" a corner store that sells toys, cards, small tools, stationary, sweets and garden ornaments.

Pandemic

Our little group got together and we played a game called Pandemic. This game has been around for a long time now, must be a few years but I've never played it.  I have made and played a Print n' Play game called Pandemic-Express which closely simulates Pandemic but uses dice instead of cards.

I was looking forwards to playing the game and was not disappointed. There were three of us playing and I got the role of ... er ... the guy who can build research stations. 

There are many roles in the game and everyone gets to choose one role, each of which has an ability that breaks the basic game rules. I like that there are more roles than players, that'll give the game some replayability.

As to the components, I was pretty impressed. The board was very nice, a good heavy weight and richly coloured. the cards were very nice too. Clear text etc, but I was a little a little colour problem with blue/purple. the cards and board colours didn't match too well.

The disease cubes were semi transparent plastic, and I believe that they were painted wooden cubes in a previous version. I'm glad to have played with the plastic ones, I prefer them to wooden cubes.

I glanced through the rulebook and it looked pretty good too. I actually downloaded and read a quick-play guide from the interwebs so I didn't have to refer to the manual for actual use.  the chap who owned the game was playing for the first time too and he didn't feel the need to constantly refer to it, and that suggests that it is well written.

I loved the game, the fact that we lost had no impact on that! the interaction and planning steps were great fun, and the tease of having just lost and then working out that we might have won, if only we'd dome something slightly different was great.  It appears to be a game where you must work together, you must interact if you want a chance of winning. Playing on your own, trying to collect cards and keep on top of the outbreaks is just impossible.

Lots of consideration on your turn and other peoples turns keeps you involved in the game all of the time. Great!

This is a game I'm looking forward to playing again sometime soon!

Settlers of Catan - review of sorrts

On Thursday I played Settlers of Catan for the very first time. I've known about the game for years, but never bought a copy for myself.  Whenever the opportunity came up, I would look around and there was always some other game that looked more exciting or more like it would appeal to my family. Always some other priority.

On Thursday I actually got to play someone else's copy of the game. I was very happy with the look and feel of the game. the components were perfectly suitable. Everything was colourful, the rules were clear and the bits and cards felt good to handle.

I liked the look of the board, although I do have one very minor complaint. I wish that the hexes that make up the main board had symbols on them to match with the resource cards themselves. It's just a very minor niggle.

I liked the way it played, a turn could be very quick. Roll the dice, grab the resources, a quick trade perhaps, then play the resources that you worked out you were going spend while everyone else was taking their turns. Very simple, very straight forward.

But what did I think? I liked it. I didn't love it. I will happily play it anytime, there is enough social and game interaction to make this a game I will always play if someone offers it up. But the theme is not one to inspire me to pick it myself when I have so many other games to play.

Ticket to Ride : Europe - first play

Last night was my first experience of Ticket to Ride: Europe. I've been a player and a fan of the original game for years, but have never been inclined to buy any of the variants and never, until now, had the chance to play someone else's copy.

Stephen turned up to the group with Europe and a copy of Settlers (STILL IN SHRINK!) and as no-one knew the rules to Catan we opted to play Europe.

It was a fun game no doubt about that and very easy to get into, my experience of the original made everything familiar.

Apart from the change in the board and tickets there was a new feature called "tunnels" which I thought was pretty intense.  Playing trains to a tunnel is the same as usual, but you MAY have to play additional cards of the appropriate colour.  You lay out your cards, then turn over three cards from the deck, if any of those three are the same colour as your cards (or an engine) then you have to play additional cards of that colour in order to get your train down on the table.

This means of course that you have to risk not getting your train down, if you don't have any extra cards, or wait and save up additional cards.  I have to say this is a clever addition to the system, it adds extra depth without complexity or fiddliness. 

Another subtle difference is that some routes actually require an engine (or two) in order to play to the route.  The requirement is printed on the board making the situation very clear.  Once again they've created a seemless way to integrate a new feature. Double well done you game designer chaps! I love that you've added to a great game in such a slick way.

There is another new feature, that of stations, which allows you to get past blockages. We didn't play with stations in this game, as three of the players were totally new to Ticket to Ride. I'm looking  forward to trying this option.

In summary, after one play of this variant, I'm sold. it's good, solid, and every bit as fun as the original.

Catan, next week :)

Battlestar Galactica - Review...ish

This review (really just a first impression) is based on a single four player session, where I played another gentleman's game (thanks Gary!).

First off, I can say that it is a rather beautiful game, I would expect nothing less from a Fantasy Flight production.

The board is big enough to hold the pieces and everything seems pretty clear and straight forward. I really like the dials feature for tracking the resources.The standup counters for your playing pieces are a delight, good thick card standing on a solid well thought out base.The character cards were nice. they could so easily have been simple card-size, but having them so large made them feel significant.

The action cards being so-small seemed a bit of a shame. The iconography and text was clear, no problem there, just a bit of shame they are so small when you have to handle them all of the time.The fighter ships were nice to look at and "fiddle" with.

So all in all the components were nice and suited the game play very well.

But how did it play?

I'll be more than happy to play again, I really enjoyed the game. Yet... There is a real feeling of overwhelming pressure to do something, but the something isn't something I could achieve.

I tried firing the guns a few times, but that was very ineffective. I tried to save cards to put someone in the brig, but couldn't do it in time. It kind of felt like the game was playing me. So much went on between my turns, and my actions seemed so pitiful, that I was never able to effect a stratergy, it was just reactive moves.

I haven't played the game without cylons, but I suspect the game would still kick butt.  Add them in and suddenly its a wild chaotic ride!

I can compare the game to two other cooperative games (both without traitors) , Lord of the Rings and Red November.  In those two games there are similar constant complications and at times they are overpowering in the same way, yet I don't get the same feeling of hopelessness from them.

In LOTR you often don't have the cards to do what you want, in RN the same thing, but you can co-operate with the other players. You can make a plan. Perhaps that's what is missing, there's no planning stage.

Well if this all sounds negative, don't read too much into it. It was only one game (which I lost) and I'm really looking forward to playing again.