Category Games

Board games for Spooky Season

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A collection of board games

If you’re not in the mood for movies and have a group of friends over, might I suggest some themed games appropriate for Halloween?

Zombies!

Judging by the number of Walking Dead spinoffs, zombies are still popular (George Romero’s daughter has a zombie movie coming out that I’m looking forward to) and board games are not immune to this.

Dead of Winter – If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead then you’ll love Dead of Winter. It is a cooperative (maybe) game where the players take control of survivors in a zombie apocalypse. In addition to the main objective (which is chosen at random from a stack, so the game is different each time) each of the 2-5 players will be given a secret objective of their own. Some of the secret objectives may be in direct opposition to the main objective, making one or more of the players a secret traitor. The game makes use of Plaid Hat Games Crossroad mechanic, where a story card is drawn after each player’s turn, requiring them to make a choice with good or bad consequences. The random objectives, paranoia inducing hidden traitor and story driven Crossroad cards make this one of my favorite games.

Dead of Winter Flick ’em Up! – It’s Dead of Winter, but it swaps out the dice rolling for combat that has the players actually ‘flicking’ tokens at plastic zombies and barriers to knock them down. You still have random objectives chosen at the start, but no Crossroads cards. Also gone is the hidden traitor, instead the game can be played cooperatively or as teams of opposing factions. It is less story focused and is instead a physical dexterity game. Great for younger players, but keep away any pets that may want to eat a plastic token if it flies off the table.

Tiny Epic Zombies – It’s like Dead of Winter lite. Still a great game, slightly less story as there is no Crossroads system and no hidden traitor. It is faster paced than Dead of Winter and despite the smaller package and lower price-tag, it packs a lot of quality and value in the box, as most of the Tiny Epic line does. Unlike Dead of Winter, this game also has a solo mode if your (up to 5) friends are not available. It can be played cooperatively, free-for-all, or with a player controlling the zombies.

Zombie Labyrinth – Probably the most ‘traditional’ board game on this list, with the players rolling dice and moving tokens around a board. It’s not my favorite, but is great with younger players as the rating is for ages 5 and up.

Zombie Dice – Not pictured here because I can’t find my copy of it, Zombie Dice is super simple. You have a cup of coloured dice that have symbols for feet, brains and shotgun blasts. You are the zombies and you are trying to roll brains without getting blasted by the shotguns. It’s fast and easy to learn, but the rattling dice may drive anyone not playing crazy.

Gamers love Lovecraft

Elder Sign – One of the first games I bought when I started getting into modern board games and still one of my favorites. A museum in Arkham has accumulated so much weird stuff that the gates to beyond are starting to break. You and your team of investigators have to stop the weird and find enough Elder Signs to seal the breach and prevent one of the Ancients Ones from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos from coming through. If you’ve ever played Yahtzee, you can play Elder Sign. You roll dice to match symbols to cards to earn rewards, using items you collect and your chosen investigator’s unique ability to manipulate the dice.

A Study in Emerald – Based on Neil Gaiman’s fanfic mashup of Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Emerald is what happens if you LOSE at Elder Sign. Players are given secret identities at the start. Loyalists who are happy with the status quo and Restorationists are those who don’t want to live in a world that has been subjugated by a mad space god. We’d probably call those people ‘woke’ today. It’s a fun combination of worker placement and deck building with one of the oddest point systems I’ve ever played with. It’s almost impossible to tell who’s going to win until it’s all over.

Miskatonic University – Another quick and easy to learn game it’s essentially a card game with set collection that lasts only 5 rounds. Not as fun or thematic as the others on this list, but also not as complicated.

Cthulhu Fluxx – After Zombie Dice, this is probably the smallest and least expensive game in the list, but also one of the most fun. If you’ve never played a Fluxx game, the rules are simple. Draw a card. Play a card. At least that’s how it starts. As you play, both the rules and the win conditions change and keep changing. The Fluxx games are wild and unpredictable and that’s what makes them so fun to play.

Something different

Gloom – If you are a fan of The Addams Family, or Tim Burton’s new show Wednesday, then Gloom is for you. The objective of Gloom is to draw transparent cards from a deck and lay them on top of others to modify them and make your family of characters as miserable as possible, before bumping them off one by one to score points, or use the cards to improve the lives of your opponents. It’s a fun and funny 2-5 player game that is best enjoyed with friends who love telling stories about the tragedies that befall their family members

Ultimate Werewolf – The box says it is good with up to 75 players. It’s perfect for parties because there is no board, no game pieces, no dice to roll and you don’t need to be at a table to play it. Players are villagers, trying to figure out who is a werewolf before they get eaten, or werewolves trying to avoid suspicion so they can eat the villagers, the fun all depends on how into it the players get, and maybe how much alcohol they’ve consumed.

Betrayal at House on the Hill – I love this game so much. You are a group of friends exploring a haunted house, but you build the house as you play, tile by tile, so the layout is never the same twice. At one point in the game, a player will trigger “The Haunt”, which will reveal what is going on in the house, and turning one of the players into the villain. There are 50 scenarios in the book, combined with the randomness of the board creation giving Betrayal HUGE replay value. I have yet to play a game that wasn’t memorable. Just last week, I had people over to play, and the ‘Haunt’ player managed to kill himself the very first turn after the haunt was revealed, but he STILL won the game because our team was split up and our strongest character got lost in the basement (also, I was suffering from the Wil Wheaton curse of terrible dice rolling)

Mysterium – Everybody has played Clue at least once in their life, right? Now imagine one the players gets to be the ghost of the murder victim. That’s Mysterium. Up to 6 people take on the roles of psychic detectives while one player tries to direct them to the who, what, where of their murder, by sending visions in their dreams. It’s so much more fun than Clue.

That’s not all

There are more, many more, some I want but don’t have like Last Night on Earth where you play as survivors in a zombie apocalypse who are just trying to make it out alive, or Fury of Dracula, an asymmetric hunt game where one player is the titular vampire lord and the rest are hunters trying to track him down across Europe. It’s a fantastic game, but I don’t own it because my friend does.

Watching Jeopardy on Netflix makes me feel smart

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Before a few weeks ago, I had not watched an episode of Jeopardy in a loooong time. I was probably living at my parents house the last time I saw one because they liked to watch it and I watched with them.

Not long ago I saw Jeopardy was on Netflix and I though “What? There must be like a thousand episodes by now. Did they put them all on Netflix?”

The answer is no. They put some of their Tournament of Champions episodes on Netflix, and I like it.

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Wits and Wagers

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Everyone has played Trivial Pursuit by now right? I remember playing it at the cottage in the summer and my parents and their friends playing all day long on New Year’s Day. I always found it was most fun with large groups of people, broken into teams, because often are strong in one area of trivia, and weak in another. Teams make things more even, plus it’s just fun.

But if you only have a few people, or some of the players just don’t have a head full of useless trivia? How about a game where knowing the right answer is not as important as knowing who in your group might know the answer?

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Are you bored with Monopoly yet?

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Do you like playing games, but always have this one person you play with who is hyper competitive and kind of makes the experience less fun? One of my all time favorite games is a co-operative game. Instead of playing against each other, you work as a team to defeat the game. It has an incredible amount of randomness in it’s setup, so the replay factor is huge. In short, you don’t have to worry about one person winning every time you play and rubbing it everyones face, and you won’t get bored playing the same exact game time after time. That’s why I love Elder Signs.

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A speed running lingo primer

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Awesome Games Done Quick 2019 is at the midway point and has alread raised over half a million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation.  If my article last week got you curious enough to check it out but you were confused by some of the things people were saying, I decided put together a small glossary of the most common terms used by the announcers and runners.

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Awesome Games Done Quick is here!

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Twice a year the speed running community gets together for a week long marathon to raise money for charity. This time it is the Prevent Cancer Foundation. The winter version is Awesome Games Done Quick (hereafter to be referred to as simply AGDQ) and it starts this Sunday, the 6th. It goes live on Twitch at 11:30am Eastern.

What is speed running? I’m glad you asked. Despite images the name might conjure, you won’t find it in the Olympics and Usain Bolt has no medals in it. Speed Runners play video games. They play them as fast as they can, competing to claim records and titles. It may sound silly to some and I’ll be honest, the first time my brother told me about it I had no strong desire to watch, but when I did, I was hooked and have watched both the Summer and Winter marathons for the past several years.

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joined the Illuminati in The Secret World

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TSW_Final_Poster_RGB-378x600The Secret World is an urban fantasy MMO that Funcom, the makers of  Age of Conan and Anarchy Online, released out two years ago.  When it first came out, it had a subscription fee which has since been removed.  The game is now pay once and play forever, the mandatory subscription has been replaced with an optional “membership” that gives you extras you can read about here.  Also, they periodically release new downloadable content to buy.  I got it off Steam when they had a deal on for the basic game and first five DLC for only $20.

I love urban fantasy.  Jim Butcher is currently my favorite author, and I still tune in to watch Supernatural every week.  I signed up to be in the beta and took the personality test they e-mailed me four years ago, but for some reason I didn’t get the game when it was released.  It may have been because I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and don’t play more than one MMO at a time, but I think it may have been more because I just didn’t know it had been released.  Maybe I was asleep or just too pre-occupied at the time, but I don’t remember seeing anyone talking about this game at all and I probably still wouldn’t know it was out, had I not seen the special price pop up on Steam.  Which is too bad, because I really like this game, and I hope more people discover it.

A lot of the MMOs I’ve played in the past have been very similar.  They looked different, some had a Fantasy base,  some were Sci-fi and a couple were all about super heroes but, at their core, you pick a class,  you  do missions to gain experience for leveling and unlocking new abilities specific to your class.  The Secret World does away with classes and levels.   As you gain experience you earn skill points and ability points which are spent improving your chosen weapon and picking the abilities you want to use.  You pick the weapon combinations you wish to use and what skills you want.  There is a progression, you need to pick lower ranked skills to get to the next ones up, but you are not locked into a weapon once you pick it, if you find you don’t like fist weapons anymore and want to try blood magic, just start adding points there.  The only caveat is that you can only use active abilities from a weapon you currently have equipped, but you can equip two weapons at once and swap weapons any time you are out of combat.  Passive abilities can be used from any weapon without needing that weapon to be equipped.  There are over 500 skills to choose, giving you an amazing range of choice with which to customize your character.  Often have been the times I was playing a game as one class and wished I could use a skill or two from anothers tree.  That isn’t a problem here.

Secret-world-factions-839x600When you create your character you choose your name, appearance and faction.  There used to be a quiz you could do which would suggest the best faction for you, but I can’t find it anywhere (edit: found it!), just these videos that show the philosophies of each group. Your faction will be your team for PvP, but there are no benefits to joining one over the other.  The style of dialog for the quest givers is different and so are the story missions, but that’s about the only real difference, so take a look at the videos and pick the team that  fits your personality, or try ’em all.  There are only three, and you get three character slots, so give each a shot and see what you think.

Speaking of quests, The Secret World doesn’t really break the mold, but they add some improvements and polish it up real nice.  Most MMOs have the typical “Go kill X quantity of monster type Y” or the fetch and carry quests, and this game is no exception, but they add some new quest types that are a refreshing change.  There are covert missions, where the goal is not to be seen and my favorite, the Investigation missions.  We’re all used to going to the NPC with the exclamation mark on their head, getting the quest and following the marker on our mini-map to where we are supposed to be.  The action missions are like that, but the investigation missions give a cryptic clue, and that’s it.  It’s up to you to decode the meaning and figure out where you are to go and what to do.  Sometimes you need to reference things in the real world to solve the puzzle.  They can be maddeningly tough, but oh so satisfying when you figure them out.  They also did a good job of making obtaining the quests a little more interesting.  All the big quests are delivered via animated cutscenes, which isn’t new but sure beats a window full of text, the dialog is well written and the voice acting better than what you usually get in a video game, but even on the little ones, your objectives are often received through a picture of a note, a flyer on the ground or a plaque on the wall.  It’s not a big thing, but it breaks up the monotony of boxes of text.

I’m still in the first big zone, I haven’t tried PvP or any of the missions that require a party, but I am REALLY enjoying The Secret World.  The character customizability and quests that make you think are things I’ve wanted in a game for a long time and am kicking myself for not getting into this one sooner.

 

 

Played The Walking Dead Episodes 3 and 4

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An episodic horror adventure that’s really more of an interactive story than it is a video game, and that’s a good thing.

I was a big fan of the graphic adventure games of the 80’s and 90’s. I must have played every Quest game Sierra Online ever produced and have always been kind of sad that the genre died out. Part of the attraction was the puzzles to be figured out, but most what was fun in those games were the stories and humor. Telltale Games The Walking Dead brings new life to the adventure game, and puts more of an emphasis on story and character than on the point and click gameplay.

Fans of Robert Kirkmans graphic novels and the TV show on HBO don’t need to worry about seeing the same story retold in a new medium. The game takes place in the same world, but features all new characters with their own stories. I won’t give too much away, but one of the things I really liked was that instead of making the protagonist a clone of Rick Grimes, he’s almost his complete opposite. Rick was a Sheriff, while Lee Everett is a convicted murderer on his way to prison when the Zombie outbreak occurs.

The look and feel of the game is fairly unique. It’s done in a 3D cell shading style that borrows heavily from the graphic novel, and instead of the static camera point of view that is most common to these games, much of the story is presented in a handheld “shaky cam” style often used in dramas today. Combined with changing camera edits, you really get the feeling of directing a story, not playing it. You decide how to respond to people’s questions, how to distribute food when low on rations, and who lives or dies when the walkers are swarming your group of survivors. The game is delivered in an episodic format (except the iOS version apparently), each ending with a cliff hanger, much like both the comic book and show do. 5 episodes are planned for season 1.

I love this game, it gets my heart pounding like few games do, and has only a couple of negative points, which aren’t big enough to stop me from recommending it to everyone I know. The first is the controls. They are a little finicky. You have to have your cursor on exactly the right spot to work, and I got stuck at one point in episode three where I knew what I neede to do, but just could not figure out how to make the controls do what was required. I re-played the same scene about 10 times before getting it to work, which was frustrating, but fortunately one of the few times it was that difficult to play.

My second complaint about the game is more of a disappointment. One of the key features advertised was that the story of the game would change based on the decisions and choices you make. It even says it right at the start of each episode, “This game series adapts to the choices you make. The story is tailored by how you play.” Which sounds AWESOME! Except it is misleading. Dialog changes, and people’s attitude towards you changes, but the story will always unfold in the same way, no matter whos side you choose in an argument, or what you say to anyone. Even when you choose to save character and another dies, it ultimately doesn’t matter as they both play the same role in subsequent episodes. So the re-play value was nowhere near as high as I thought it would be. What is cool about it is that at the end of the each episode the game shows how your choices compared to those of others who played the game, and when each new episode starts, the “Previously on The Walking Dead” clips reflect your decisions.

Overall, it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a while, simply because of the emotional impact the story and characters deliver. I can’t wait for the climax in episode 5.