Boardgames, anyone?

It has arrived!

At my age I shouldn’t be this excited about a big plastic toy, but I have no regrets.

Anyone ever had a complete 180 on their opinion of a game? I had that recently with Trudvang Legends - when it first came out I hated it. A dudes on the map RPG with no fail state, not even a fail forward so much as a "try again with no real penalty until you win". Seemed utterly pointless. But a friend recently encouraged me to revisit it and look at it as a CYOA that happens to have a light combat minigame, and look at the "fail state" instead as the narrative decision points (that don't become clearer until towards the end of the game). Now I actually quite enjoy it.

Ark Nova’s probably the most recent one I can remember.

Absolutely loved my first few plays, then cracked it out the other week and it was just so underwhelming and meh it’s now on the sale / swap pile.

Picked up Arcs today. No idea when I'll ever get to play it, but learning the rules and looking at it should keep me amused for a while.

Me too! But the reviews and theme swung it for me.

Thanks for the update!

Thought this was a self-contained game so it's a shame it's really just a lead-in to the (excellent sounding) campaign.

Base Arcs seems like a fun game in it's own right, definitely their most accessible game and it's quick and easy to get to the table. It seems to me to have taken a lot of elements from big complex games and distilled them into something quite clever and neat, although not necessarily better. It's definitely a game where luck can really screw you over, and I think that could be quite frustrating. Looking forward to playing it with 3 or 4 as I don't think it's going to be a great 2 player game.

But yeah the campaign looks the better part of the package.

It's coming to the time of year where we play our annual Twilight Imperium game.

Last year a mate bought me Prophecy of Kings and I've still not played it - does anyone have experience of it?

I don't want to sound ungrateful but I'm honestly a bit wary of introducing it. From what I've seen and read it takes away 'above the table' time and makes players turn a bit more inward which is exactly what I don't want when playing a 10 hour game. Seems hard to revert to the base game once it's introduced too.

Nice. Still haven’t got mine to the table yet, but sorting and sleeving took an absolute age. The gametrayz and everything are nice, but it’s one of the least intuitive setups I’ve encountered.

Played Stalker yesterday - the first campaign mission. With two of us, it took about three hours, with a couple of breaks and a fair bit of rule checking (we still got some basic stuff wrong, but there you go...). I reckon if you had a better grasp you could do the mission in around two hours give or take.

The short version is that it was really enjoyable. They've nailed the theme, which works well for a dungeon crawler in any case. Despite the rule-checking, the overall flow is very clear and smooth: pick an encounter card which adds flavour to the turn and generates an event for the beginning and (possibly) end of the turn; take your player moves; activate the enemies (who may already have been involved during the player turn). Gameplay is essentially made up of exploration, looting and combat-and/or-stealth.

The exploration works well as you add overlay cards onto the tiles - these relate to the mission e.g. in mission 1 trying to locate and rescue a prisoner in a bandit camp. Enter a room with the overlay and typically you flip it and it reveals something that pushes the story forward or focuses further exploration. In the meantime, bandits / mutants are patrolling and in their phase will move following what is stipulated on the activation card (which can be yellow, for low threat, or red for high, if you've crossed their line of sight or fired your gun etc). You can engage them or attempt to bypass them entirely (or better still, sneak in behind and knife them). Combat is die-based with bonuses based on your stalker and weapon. For instance, my character was a sniper and was pretty lethal when four spaces away (positioning yourself with line of sight that far away is trickier than it seems). My mate was a tanky shotgun wielding meathead. Human enemies drop loot upon death, and there are also piles of loot to search through on the map if you have time.

The good:

- absolutely gorgeous, as you'd expect from Awaken Realms. Great components and general aesthetics. Some of the best miniatures I've seen. I'm not a painter, so it was well worth getting the sundrop version.
- Rule-checking aside, there's little downtime - the game moves at a decent clip through the three main phases and has a good feeling of forward momentum.
- That said, there are times where you're going to spend a few minutes discussing the best strategy given the current layout and state of the mission. It has just the right amount of tactical decision-making.
- The Event deck - a combination of mission-specific and random events - frames each turn wonderfully well and is great for adding flavour and atmosphere. The environment cards placed on the map that you flip also keep the scenario fresh and exciting.
- Both before and after the mission, there's Zone exploration where you use a map, with stickers you add as you go along, allowing you to visit contacts, traders etc. It's more Gloomhaven than ISS Vanguard (you also have a binder in Stalker but it's much simpler and easier to manage).


The less good:

- we found it a bit easy - maybe a combination of us missing rules and it being the first mission? Don't get me wrong, you can still lose most of your health in one fell swoop. I'm looking forward to the challenge ramping up.
- YMMV on this one but they take the simplest approach to certain things e.g. line of sight, which is purely forward, back, left right, with no diagonals or other complications / nuances. Personally this worked for me and helped minimise time drawing imaginary lines to work out if a bandit could see you or vice-versa.
- I hope you like punching cardboard and sorting stuff. There's a lot in the box, and this took me some time the day before. That said, they've done a great job with inlays and pictorial instructions printed on the sides of the box on how to sort things.
- Set up: takes time. It's fiddly. There's a separate Mission Guide for setting up a given mission. This is in addition to the massive rule book and further rules in the binder. Which brings me to...
-...having rules in 3+ different places is not helpful. I think they are better at rulebooks in general, but it's easy to miss small things. That said, the player help cards are excellent, with a useful summary of game flow on one side and actions on the other, as well as another icon reference card.

There's plenty more I haven't mentioned - the nature of the dice, the anomaly mechanics / artifacts, stalker abilities, radiation and the geiger counter, other random stuff that occurs as you play.

It has a complexity rating of 3.69/5 on BGG - a bit surprising, but maybe this reflects the learning curve. I'm pretty sure next time it will go much quicker and we'll fuck things up less. Hopefully it will be a bit more challenging. I'm confident I'll enjoy it just as much, especially as we have new equipment and items to try and a stack of money to spend on new stuff pre-mission. I can't wait to play again, to be honest, which is always a good sign.