I read half your comment, Foamy, and immediately started typing in the quick reply box, "In the Lab is awesome" ... and then saw that apparently, I've already expressed the sentiment. Lol.
My adventures in Tabletop gaming this weekend:
I went to GenCon.
Okay, I'll go into more detail.
I demoed three games of note.
Firstly, FFG's upcoming X-COM board game. It's amazing. This rocketed to the top of my "must buy when it releases" list. It runs in two major stages each turn, a timed stage and a resolution stage. In the timed stage, the app (free app on the App Store for iOS and the Play store for Android, also available as a web-based application for other browser-capable systems) walks through different phases, instructing players to do things like draw new research choices, places UFOs on the global map or in orbit, draw aliens to feature in base invasions or missions, draw crisis cards, or deploy soldiers, satellites, scientists, or interceptors to deal with these events. The timed nature keeps the pace up and forces you to make the resource allocation decisions under pressure. Each soldier, scientist, interceptor, or satellite you assign to a task costs 1 megacredit or whatever they call them, so you have to balance your turn's budget (which varies) against the stuff you need/want to accomplish.
Then, during the resolution phase, each resource you can assign to that task gives you a die you can roll towards success -- the dice succeed on 2/6 faces, and then there's a d8 that serves as a press your luck mechanic if you don't get sufficient successes and want to try rolling again. Each time you reroll gets progressively riskier, and can kill off your interceptors, soldiers, or satellites (and exhaust your scientists so they need to rest up next turn) if you press your luck too far. Tech research gives abilities that can modify rolls or save you from bad effects, and so on. The coolest part of the game from the role I played (the Commander, who manages interceptors and crises) are the crisis cards, which you draw in the timed phase and resolve in the resolution phase. When you draw crisis cards, you draw two at a time, and choose one to stick in the resolution queue, and one to discard. They're all terrible, so there's this delicious sense that you're making an entire string of Sophie's Choice decisions that could quite possibly end up losing the game if you choose the wrong one at the wrong time. It's glorious. The game's hard, even on easy mode, which gives you unlimited pause time in the timed phase. The game can be played short of the 4 player max, with the app giving more time based on the number of players to account for shuffling around the table to do different roles.
Next up was Shadowrun: Crossfire from Catalyst Games. This is a co-op deckbuilding game, kind of reminiscent of the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game or whatever Paizo calls it. In it, you each grab a race card, which determines hand size, health, and starting credits, and a role card, which determines what kinds of cards you specialize in. Then, each player is dealt and obstacle to overcome, which can run the gamut between gangs, security measures, and so on. You then take turns playing cards that deal damage to the obstacles, each of which require different types of card in different orders to be played against it. The game is mostly about helping your teammates out killing their obstacle when your damage type comes up, and working out how best to cooperate to spread your specialties around when they're most needed. Then, when you defeat obstacles, the team earns money that you use to buy new cards (themed as weapons, hacking gear, spells, and contacts) off the black market.
There are some persistent effects that change each turn to throw some wrenches into the mix, and you need to complete certain numbers of obstacles to finish the mission and win the game. There's a game-to-game character advancement mechanic that we kind of talked about but I didn't see in action. I was worried, based on brief spectating of other demos last year at DragonCon and this year at Origins, that the game would end up being too fiddly with too many moving parts, but it really wasn't. The only thing that disappoints me is that they decided to implement the levelling mechanic with stickers. This isn't Risk Legacy, guys.. I'd jump at a version with vinyl stickers or magnetized race templates or something, but will probably settle for the sticker-based version eventually anyways. This can be played solo, FWIW, but needs 4 characters no matter how many you play with.
Finally, Fantasy Flight had demos of their recently announced fleet combat game, Star Wars: Armada. This is where you leave the intricacies and detail of the dogfights to be super-abstracted, and instead move Star Destroyers and Nebulon B frigates around the table. I went in pretty skeptical; I didn't like the look of the components (the capital ship models themselves are gorgeous, but the starfighters are tiny, not very detailed, and unpainted, and the bases look like a cheap, fragile mess), I wasn't sold on the movement system, and, I'll be honest, I'm already deeply invested, financially, in X-Wing Miniatures.
The movement system turned out decent but a little clumsy. I like the effect, but not the way you get there -- the template has a tendency to get in the way (since it's a one-size template that you bend at plastic joints based on your cap ship's maneuverability) and the turn order is such that I'm not sure that there will be a lot of out-maneuvering folks. Which is kind of thematic; the ships certainly turn with that sense of momentum and "sliding" that the huge ship templates in epic XWM gives. But the only thing you pre-commit to is speed, so long as you move the appropriate speed on the template, you can click it to any legal bends and decide exactly where you'll end up. And you shoot before you move, so there's even less guesswork about whether you'll get a shot.
The game uses alternating activations. I asked James Kniffen, the lead designer (who was runnnig my demo...) whether there were any mechanics to downplay or combat the advantage that out-activating your opponent often gives in such designs, by offering one player multiple unanswered activations in a row, and the ability to force his outnumbered opponent to activate his big hitters at inopportune times by stalling with less relevant activations in his more numerous force. James kind of brushed it off and said it wasn't important, which bothered me.
The game abstracts squadrons a lot compared to XWM -- they have no facing, they act in their own phase of the turn (unless directed by a squadron command on the command dial), and the way they engage with each other, locking them down until one side of the engagement is dead, seems reasonable and satisfying. They're very streamlined, but don't get in the way of the capital ship slugging. I have no idea how effective they can be vs. cap ships themselves.
Combat uses 3 dice types, which come with the game. Which dice are available depends on the ship's facing's attack rating and the range of the attack. If you've played any FFG X-Wing Minis, you'll be familiar with rolling d8's to look for hit icons. Capital ships don't roll dice to evade those hits, though. Instead, they have some defensive abilities they can use once per turn, denoted by tokens that get flipped from green (available) to red (used). These can do things like shunt damage to an adjacent shield facing, halve incoming damage from that attack, and so on. Some of the attack dice have results that allow the attacker to "lock" an ability for the duration of the attack, preventing its use against the current attack without exhausting it for the entire turn.
Turn progression goes as such: each player throws a command (implemented on little plastic and cardboard dials that stack) on the bottom of their command stack. Bigger ships have bigger stack sizes, which means it takes longer for newly issued commands to take effect, forcing you to plan up to three turns (for the VSD) ahead. Commands don't directly influence turn resolution, but do things like give an extra die to an attack, allow you to change your speed or bend your movement template one extra click, or command a squadron to move AND attack during your ship's activation, sacrificing its activation later in the turn. Capital ships then fire first and follow that up with a move, alternating activations. When all capital ships have acted, starfighter squadrons may move or attack, with no facing or anything.
All in all, I liked most of the mechanics. They gave a good feel to capital ship combat. I confirmed that I dislike the components. The ship movement template has this tendency to get in the way, and is likely to be very fragile. The demo template I had had already seen its glue come loose so the cardboard spacers between the plastic bendable joints slid out freely, for instance, and the clicking nature of the joints themselves is bound to be prone to wear and become less precise. The squadrons track their activation status (which was kind of clever, I'll concede) and health on their bases, with a sliding piece of cardboard for activation and a rotating dial on top of the round base for health. The capital ships sit elevated above the board on little quarter-inch legs at the 4 corners of the base. This is so you can manipulate the dial on each side of the ship that marks shield health. This is, obviously, a terrible idea for a gridless miniatures game. I dislike constantly fiddling with base stat-tracking in a gridded system like Clix; adding that notion to a gridless system that you expect to be competitive is begging for accidents, "accidents," and the sour feelings that result from both in a tournament setting.
The good news is that the components are a work in progress, so some of those issues might change before its release early next year. I'm taking a wait-and-see approach on that front.
Finally, though... I kickstarted a deckbuilder from Evil Hat Productions called
Zeppelin Attack. It arrived a few weeks ago, and I finally got a chance to break it out and play with some friends at GenCon. And it is fantastic. I'll hold off on it for now and try to write a complete review of it later today or this week, since it's a released game that I've got multiple plays of already.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
