Battlestar Galactica with revealed Cylon player

Last Friday we played Battlestar Galactica. I've gradually introduced some of the elements from the Pegasus expansion over the last months, like the new characters, crisis cards and treachery cards. These all work fine and add a bit to the experience of the game. This time we thought it would be nice to use the option to have one of the players revealed as a Cylon at the start of the game.

How could one object to having Caprica Six around?

Because this makes life a lot harder for the human players (who still have to guess the other Cylon, but bear the full brunt of Cylon obstruction from the start) the revealed Cylon gets a hidden objective. This consists of a side which must win (human or Cylon) and a special condition, for example that the Galactica must be heavily damaged and some resources at a very low level.


The hidden objective should keep the other Cylon on its toes, while the objectives should tend to prevent the Cylons from pressing their advantage too soon. We only concluded that only at the end though.

My personal moment of glory: taking down Scar

Which meant that we, the humans, had an extremely tough time. I'm pretty sure it wasn't all due to the revealed Cylon but things went from bad to worse in no time. We never even managed a second jump, such were the crisis cards. And we failed so many of them we wondered if we'd succeed for any of them. You could feel the depression taking over.

Not that the Cylons (Andries especially) enjoyed their luck in silence. The constant happy chatter added insult to injury. It all seemed too easy for the frackin' toasters to obstruct our bids. I always seemed short of cards to play, while others had their hands full but pretty useless.

This was one of the easier moments in the game, really

Likewise we couldn't get rid of the raiders and heavy raiders, which meant centurions on board and rapid loss of civilian ships. This cost us the game in the end as humanity faced genocide.

As a small consolation this shut up the revealed Cylon player, because he hadn't been able to fulfill his victory conditions yet. This meant that Paul, the other Cylon, won the game alone. No mercy from him, so well played.

Gerard in a pose characteristic for the humans that night

I'm not overwhelmed with the revealed Cylon as it puts a lot of pressure on the humans from early on, but mostly because it takes away part of the atmosphere of paranoia that is central to the game. The best games are the ones in which the last Cylon stays hidden till the end and keeps fracking with the minds of the humans. I guess we'll give the revealed Cylon another try some time, but don't see it as a regular guest appearance.

Next time we might try the New Caprica ending. I've been waiting with this one because it seems to make the game longer and short length is not a problem of the game. On the other hand, I'm curious how it will pan out. It is an interesting episode in the series.

And after that, the Exodus expansion...

Bonapartist France defeated - Levee en Masse

Played a game Levée en Masse tonight, relearning it after more than a year. But it's fairly easy to pick up and once you've gone through the rules, the game plays fast, in around an hour.

Not bad eh? No real challenges to the republic after first deck

Levée en Masse is one of the solo States of Siege games published by Victory Point Games. It comes in a ziplock bag with rudimentary quality of components, but a well written rulebook. Recently VPG has published higher quality versions of some games, while GMT is also releasing a few. But if you don´t care more about gameplay than components, you´ll be fine with the original VPG edition.

In the game you play solo as the French republicans against foreign armies on the map and monarchist and despotist (ie Bonaparte or some other general) rivals on the political track. The enemies are all driven by the event deck while you can counter them in a limited number of actions.

The main challenge is to survive the game to the end, which means keeping the enemy armies out of Paris. If you make it, the extent of the victory is determined by the extent to which you have kept the monarchists and despotists down and the enemies back.

Looking good after the Terror: puppet states in place, republicanism dominates, enemies far away

The game goes through 3 decks. The first deck covers the initial revolution up to the execution of King Louis XVIII, the second the Terror and deepest military crisis, while the third deals with French expansion and later coalition wars. Each deck poses different challenges, with the Vendee more active in the first deck than later, and the Austrians and Brits becoming active later.

Things seemed to be doing quite well for me until the last deck. Although I had been able to keep a decent edge for the republicans vs the despotists and monarchists, this situation reversed in the space of two or three events, which partly limited my ability to react. This meant that the despotists claimed domination of the state and I lost my military advantage.

Three turns short of the end, Paris falls to the suddenly unleashed Austrians

My dice then seemed a bit less lucky as the Austrians suddenly pressed through my Belgian puppet state and into Paris. Without my military advantage I couldn´t get them out and I lost, with only three cards to go!

But considering the domination of the Bonapartists and the many enemy troops on French soil, I wasn´t going to score well even if I had made it to the end. No real idea why it all went pearshaped in the end, probably because I don´t know the contents of the deck too well, so I may have focussed on the wrong things. Will try again soon.

Fun solo game!

Spiel day 3 - Mostly a Metro 2033 review

After two days at the Essen show itself (see day 1 and day 2, our third day was about going home. However we always make a stop at Hünxe Raststätte for a few hours of gaming our new stuff. This year we brought Metro 2033 to the table, based on the novels of a postapocalyptic society in the Moscow underground stations.

 

Game board at start

A pretty hefty game despite its very reasonable price (€25) and its components. There's a board of the Moscow underground system, decks of equipment, monsters and missions and a big bag of counters. And of course six hero miniatures.

 

The game is straight up strategic confrontation, giving the players and army to expand your territory with and a hero to fulfill missions, attack other heroes and also expand. The missions and equipment help to beef up your hero.

 

The economic engine revolves around three resources: pigs (food), ammo and mushrooms (tech). These combined allow you to build armies, buy equipment or take over neutral stations after you conquer them. Especially later in the game, when you expand your number of stations and your army size, that pigs become the deciding resource. My ability to harvest 6 pigs in the penultimate round was instrumental in my victory because all opponents had to scale down their army by the last round.
 

Midway through the game. All factions expanding rapidly

You can fight with your army or your hero and they follow the same combat system (ie your well equiped hero can be as strong as your army, which makes sense in a first person shooter world). A simple set of tactical cards gives you the chance to get bonusses on your strength, which sometimes allows weaker sides to win. It is a bit slow though.

When you're not fighting your opponents, you fight against monsters when attacking neutral stations and when the game shows attacks on your stations. The monsters become tougher in the second half of the game. 

The game evolves through three stages: a slow opening phase, as players develop their heroes and army, a fast middle phase in which the players profit from their developments and then a tough third phase in which the players confront bigger monsters and each other.

While better (or luckier) players rapidly outdistance the other players in the middle phase, they are slowed down in the end phase and most players have a reasonable chance of winning this way. Which was my luck, because I had fallen behind badly by losing two stations to monster attacks. With the lead players holding each other back and being unlucky to lose in combat, my bigger resource base made the difference.

 

Last phase: attacking opponents and the central area of the board

Player interaction is considerable, especially later in the game when it becomes necessary to attack each other. During the game, you interact through the laws which are voted every three turns. You also interact indirectly by taking the neutral side in battles, thus allowing you to screw up your opponents.

At this point there's little I can say about replay value, but there are six different factions and heroes each with different characteristics. I played with the 4th Reik faction (you can guess) who automatically win tied battles and the hero that allows you to gain extra resources. That proved a very worthwhile combination in a strategy focussing on my army rather than my hero actions. So I think you should be able to explore the options for some time.

In all this is a very decent game, with above average artwork and components that fit the theme. It feels a bit long although I think experienced players can finish it in 2 to 2.5 hours. So far it appears pretty balanced, but maybe that's a player dynamic. The drawing of tactical cards can influence the outcome of crucial battles, thus creating epic stories. I'd say it offers a lot of fun to those who like this kind of theme.
 

King of Tokyo: showing what King Kong could have done if he could fly

And finally we had another game of King of Tokyo finished that session off. I bought Fly as special action, which allowed me to negate damage by paying 2 energy. This is interesting enough, but more so when there are few opponents left, because the fewer the attacks, the easier it is to keep doing this.

So I hopped into Tokyo when I had the chance and despite not having enouhg energy in the first two rounds I had just enough lives left to continue. With Rob already out and Andries following soon after, Gerard faced an uphill task, because attacking wasn't very useful, and he wasn't scoring many point himself.

He managed to oust me from Tokyo once by special action, but had to let me back in because he was running out of lives himself. From then on it was plain sailing to victory. Hurray!

I think we can conclude that King of Tokyo, due to its ease of play and full on confrontation was a big hit.  

The Long Road to Civilization

I'm not a fast learner. I've played enough games of Civilization by now to know that the technology victory is the hardest one to achieve.

Bit cramped at the start

Collecting 15 coins is relatively straightforward and can be achieved in fewer than 10 turns. You need to focus on developing the tech cards which allow you to gain coins in the city management phase and then pile on the resources. It helps to play the Romans, who start with Code of Laws, so you first victories over villages also count towards your end goal.

Reaching the end of the culture track is also achievable in this time frame, once you see the consequences of the strategy, ie forget about technology (you need the trade points to advance) and use the culture cards to delay predators from conquering your capital.

There's always a chance of capturing a capital, but if your opponents are awake, they'll see you coming and prepare. It then becomes a war of attrition, burning through your victim's deck of units, something that other players might profit from.

So to actually attempt to win through technology, which means you need to collect another 14 technology cards, in a hierarchical order, is taking the hard road. There's not many ways to develop more than one technology each turn. Even the Russian spies are limited in usefulness, although the odd gifted technology from a culture event card or village (from the expansion) and winning the race to Atlantis (also in the expansion) may help a little.

Since the table seating is relevant in Civ, I'll start showing that last Friday night, in clockwise order, we were: Spaniards (Andries), Arabs (Rob), Germans (Paul) and Greeks (me). This meant that Andries and Paul and Rob and I were natural allies against our neighbours.

There's the Germans in blue, with the Spaniards in green closing in as well

The Spaniards and Arabs both set out on a culture victory strategy, but Paul, as first time player, decided to go for the military route. So why I persevered in my attempts to win through technology  I cannot tell. It was foolish and with a highly aggressive Teutonic neighbour, I was inviting disaster.

Soon the Prussian army was knocking on my door, destroying a scout and threatening a city. Of course I was glad to be rid of these uncouth advances when the Arabs (Rob) started to draw his attention. I also cannot explain Rob's brawn here, because he'd just received a bloody nose from the Spaniards (Andries). There really wasn't much for him to defend with.

And there the Germans have done their evil deeds, and turn northwards

Paul quickly defeated two of Rob's armies and killed one unit after another. This left the Arab capital almost defenseless and when Andries drew the extra move culture event from his magician's hat, he could walk in with the result never being in doubt.

It was a rather sudden end, but a fairly predictable one. Andries fully benefitted from Paul's aggression, while Rob and I were distracted. Not sure how you can handle this, other than by the players themselves.

I was very happy to see how well Paul picked up the rules. There's quite a lot of them, especially considering that he's had to digest the basic game and expansion at the same time. He quickly made the leap from rules to strategy and played a solid game, whipping Rob's and my asses.

It was the first time for Rob and Andries, and Paul of course, to play with the Fame and Fortune expansion. And although I'd tried some bits, I hadn't experienced it all at the same time.

I like how the generals have been toned down a bit, the metropolis is an interesting addition, as are the three 'lost civilisations' and the new civilizations add diversity. The best is probably the addition of a 5th player. However, the investment cards haven't delivered for me yet.