ManCabin Round Up

So, as you all know, we recently gathered for our annual summit - ManCabin. Or, as it's known in my more polite circles, "our gentleman's retreat".

Much drinking was done, much gaming was had. No one wants to hear about how drunk we got, so here's my review of the games I played. Keep in mind that these are only the games that I played. There were many games going on at any given time.

Dominion

Chances are, if you do any amount of boardgaming, you've heard of this game. Mik has already mentioned it here.

Anyhow, it's a deck building game - of which there are now about a dozen clones. Everyone starts with a hand of cards full of money. Each card is a "coin" worth only 1. With the coin, people buy stuff from a central bank of nine different cards. Each card does something different. The idea is to buy cards that will help you draw more cards into your hand, shut down opposing players, trash cards from your hand, or any other variety of things. The end goal is to create a small deck of cards that will allow you to buy points of dominion. The player with the highest number of points at the end wins.

This is a very popular game because of its ease to play, quickness of play, and depth of mastery. Plus, it's like playing a collectable card game without having to buy booster packs. It's an excellent game to get people who aren't into hardcore gaming into the hobby. Or as a bridge game that you can bring out with the family or non-gamer friends.

I won't go more into it, because I'm probably already preaching to the choir, here.

Mansions of Madness

I prepped all week for this game, before bringing it to ManCabin. Prepping all week? A little intense? Not at all. Mansions of Madness is one of the more innovative games that I've seen in quite a while and I prepped for it all week because I wanted to get it right.

In Mansions of Madness, one player is the Keeper, who plays against the other players. A Dungeon Master of sorts. The game takes place in a mansion of some kind. The mansion is generated ahead of time with tiles. In this game, the investigators are trying to unravel a mystery. To give you an idea of the scope of mystery and suspense in this game, let me give you a sample set up:

Your investigators are driving down a road, when suddenly your car hits a small child in the middle of the road. Getting out, you try to find the small boy, but he's nowhere to be found. Distraught, you travel to a nearby house and are let in by the butler. As you look around, you see that the house is covered with paintings of the boy - the same boy you swear you hit with your car....

And that's the set up for one of the scenarios (altered a bit so it's not too spoilery)! That's what I love about Mansion of Madness. It's not just about playing a game, but uncovering a mystery and experiencing the atmosphere.

As the players move their characters around the board, they flip over cards, which offer clues to the mystery or items that can help them in their journey. Dark events occur as they do these things. For example, the lights may go out, monsters may appear, the house may catch fire, or people might start to loose their sanity. These events are trigged by the Keeper who must spend threat tokens to pull them off. One of the cooler elements of the game is that many of the key items and locales are locked off by 7th Guest type puzzles. There are combinations that you have to decipher and patterns that you have to connect.

Another cool element of the game is that each time, the end objective of the scenario is hidden. The Keeper is working towards some goal that you don't know about. Your own objective is hidden until you uncover all of the clues. However, as the game counts down, the players' objective is eventually revealed, so as to avoid complete frustration.

In the game that we played, the players didn't discover the objective of the scenario until late in the game, but they had inadvertently foiled my objective most of the game. Through actions that I took and a few clues in the game, they were able to discern part of my objective, which was cool. They were able to win the game without knowing my entire goal.

Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt. Skullzfyre

The game is as awesome as its title and really easy play. I will definitely have to pick this one up when the budget allows. The premise is easy. Everyone plays the part of dueling wizards, trying to slay the other players at the table.

You slay other players by making spells. To make spells, you are dealt a hand of cards. The cards have the beginning, middle, and ends of spells. To cast spells, you do so on your turn, using either a beginning, middle, and end of a spell or just a middle and end; beginning and end; beginning and middle - etc. Alternatively, you can just play one card to activate a spell.

Spells which use three cards do the most damage and have the most effects, but they are slower than two card or just one card spells. So, where the strategy comes in is banking on how much damage you can take before cranking out a spell of appropriate size to kill your opponent. Throw a really big spell, and you might kill your opponent. But if your opponent uses a quicker spell, he might be able to kill you before you crank out the big, bad spell.

What makes the game ultimately fun is that the spells themselves are hilarious and as over-the-top as the title of the game. Also, it's written specifically in the rules that you must adopt your best grandiose wizard voice when you cast each spell. We enforced this rule at the cabin and one player lost his spell because he didn't use his wizard-y voice. Heh.

Okay - I've rambled enough. I'll finish the round-up in my next post.

The Battle of Dreux, 1562 AD

The Battle of Dreux was fought on 19 December 1562 between Catholics and Huguenots. The Catholics were led by Anne de Montmorency while Louis I, Prince of Condé led the Huguenots. The first general engagement of the civil wars. The Protestant army ran into the Catholic army on the road to Dreux, because of a criminal lack of foresight by Condé in posting any kind of advance scouts. Although both sides probably had roughly the same amount of cavalry with them, the Catholics had much more infantry and the benefit of superior organization (although not a more intelligent commander). The two armies stood around for two hours looking at each other before the action began -- La Noue says in his Discours that this was because it was the first time two French armies had faced each other in over a century, and each had friends and brothers on the other side and was afraid to begin what would no doubt become the first act in a great tragedy.

In the center is a pike square, with some arquebusiers firing under their protection. The first rank of pikemen crouch low so that the rank behind them can also lower their pikes to accept the charge against them -- the arquebusiers have to scoot for cover. They are being attacked by cavalry from the front and flank. This is a detail from the whole battle scene (which I do not have). At the top is the village of Bleinville, which marked the left of the Catholic line, which was routed by Admiral Coligny's horse. The Catholic right fared much better, letting Condé exhaust his cavalry on futile charges against a solid Swiss pike phalanx before Guise brought out his reserves of horse and foot. The remains of the Huguenot army retreated in good order under Coligny, who maintained completely his freedom of movement in the countryside. It is an intense irony that each of the commanders-in-chief, Montmorency for the Catholics and Condé for the Huguenots, was captured by the other side because each was behaving more like a front-line cavalry captain than the general of army -- a chronic incapacity that they both shared. Montmorency was still leading charges at 70 years old. -Wikipedia

Big ole game of Might of Arms II the other night, using the Pike and Shot variant. This was a test run for Bob's Historicon game later this summer, so the action was fast and furious. Other than the article above, I can't say too much about the details of the actual battle! I can safely say that I played on the French side, but then again, they were all French!


Games of this magnitude, on a large table, with great terrain and fully painted armies are always nothing less than a the "spectacle" that is wargaming. For a game to truly take off it needs to hit on all cylinders to succeed, and the case the other night did exactly that; good terrain, nice looking armies, solid rules, well-written scenario, and good friends.


I felt I was a lot more competent in this very historical battle than some of my past participations. I had some cannons that did little, but I effectively moved my blocks of troops to charge and counter-charge, harass the flanks, and decimate those I could get close enough to. I also had some huge rolls that weren't letting me down.


Steady on!


The fighting in the middle got thick, fast


In a big game like this there's plenty of action going on at any given moment. It's cool because on a long table (this one was ten feet I think) full of smaller 15mm figs, there's action going on all up and down the length of it. Plus, it comfortably handled five players but I think it could've gone as high as eight, fitting for a con game. Tom and I were on one side, with Andy, Brian, and Bob on the other. We held our own for a while, but the tide was turning.


The din of battle, this is the spectacle


My cannon battery outside the town

I felt I was doing well, but I think that was because my half of the army was only fighting one third of the enemy. This meant Tom's half of the army had his hands full fighting the other two thirds of the enemy. His flank was slowly, but surely, getting rolled up and on a ten foot table it was next to impossible for me to maneuver around and get over there to help out. We eventually called it, there might have been another lucky turn or two left on our side, but the outcome of the battle was pretty clear. It was truly one of those games where it doesn't matter who actually won or not though, it was all about that 'spectacle' I had mentioned.


Calling it early did mean we snuck in a bonus game of Dominion!

Dominion Grandé

Andy had picked up Dominion by Rio Grande Games, so we broke it out the other night and played a debut game. Neither of us had read the rules, although Andy had the gist of it, but we were able to hit the ground rolling in surprisingly little time.

Based on awards alone, this one seems like a 'must have', including the top 'game of the year' in 2009. So what's all the fuss about? I've seen it for as little as $33 bucks online, which seems like a good price for such a vaunted game. I labeled it as a 'boardgame' below, but really it's a card game, and after seeing what you get in the box, that's what you get indeed. Five hundred cards round out the game, no tokens or figures, just cards, your playing surface is your table. There is a nifty, plastic card divider in the box to separate the cards out by type, and a clever organizer template that goes in the middle that labels which cards are where.

In Dominion, each player starts with an identical, very small deck of cards. In the center of the table is a selection of other cards the players can "buy" as they can afford them. Through their selection of cards to buy, and how they play their hands as they draw them, the players construct their deck on the fly, striving for the most efficient path to the precious victory points by game end. -from BGG

I'm not kidding, by the third turn, Andy and I knew what we were doing, and knew it well. The mechanics are so simple to grasp, it takes no time at all to jump right in. It's solidly in that category of "easy to learn, difficult to master". In fact, our turns were going along at a quick clip too, the only times we slowed down was when we had to reshuffle a deck.


So basically you're building a deck against one another of cards. You build your deck with places such as the smithy or a mine, which give you bonus actions, or you can take cards such as militia which affects your opponent, of course more cards, like the moat, can thwart attackers. Just thinking about talking about all the cards can make you go crazy, suffice it to say there's a ton of varieties and they all act (and interact) in all kinds of ways.

You buy these cards with coins you pick up during the game. If you have too many places in your hand, and not enough coin, you'll never be able to buy anything, but too many coins and not enough items...well you can never do anything. You win the game by having the most number of estates, fiefdoms, and the like. Of course if you're buying these up, you lose out on everything else. Once the game picked up pace, the tension was building and you find yourself reacting to the other player while subtly trying to take the initiative on your own. The game was close, the final score being Andy with 42 points, and me with 38.

The replay value is wide open with Dominion, so it will get plenty of limelight on your shelf. It's also so easy to pick up and play on the fly, it's a good one to have to fill in the gaps waiting for players to show up on game night or break out in a lull. I did see in the rules something about multiple games, I don't know what that was about, but games go so quickly, you could link them in a type of campaign. The only drawback I see is that it is, at its core, a card game, no bones about it. If you're cool with that, you may want to check it out.