Star Trek: Expeditions - This Game Needs to Grow A Beard

Lately I have been playing a lot of Arkham Horror, and it's not by choice. That frickin' game is popping up like the bird flu at every single gaming group I attend. I show up for someone's "Game Night" and somehow Arkham Horror hits the table! Now I'm not one of the jerks who sighs and rolls their eyes when someone proposes a game that I don't like very much. I try to get into it; I'm there to hang with the peeps mostly. I just wish we could play a game I wasn't so burned out on.

So this is why I was super-stoked when a friend of mine invited me by to play the new Star Trek: Expeditions game. I knew nothing about it, other than "it was co-op". So I showed up all happy, with a pep in my step, ready to get my co-op on. He started explaining the rules to me, showed me the board layout and turn sequence and all that stuff. I realized that the gaming consisted of you and your friends traveling around a board and making skill rolls while a turn counter clicks down. The game ends when the counter is out and you tally up your points for making rolls and see if you won.

Son of a bitch! This damn game was Arkham Horror with a facelift! I can't escape it!

But, I still had to play the game. And as part of my resolution to myself, I had to review it. And that's going to be tough - because this game is 100% mediocre. Therein lies the problem. I don't know about you but writing reviews about crap I don't really care about is hard. I mean, if I love something I can blast out paragraphs about the mechanics, why they work so well together, and also compliment the components and all that good stuff. You know, a real gusher of a review. And if I hate a game it's a lot of fun to sit around and pick it to pieces, making jokes about broken rules and why it's so boring and maybe twist around the title of the game to make a subtle feces reference in there somewhere. (I don't like to directly say a game is shit -- I like to imply it, you know? Keep it classy.)

So when you get a complete pudding of a game like ST:E you get stuck. I don't want to write one of those reviews where I paraphrase the rulebook and summarize a turn and say, "Overall I thought it was pretty good. I award it 3/4 golden lampshades," or whatever. I like to put my own stamp on things and really give you a feel for my individual reaction. But there's nothing here to stamp down on. This game feels like a clone of Pandemic or Arkham Horror with a few very minor changes.

But the thing is, I used to love Arkham Horror and Pandemic. So now I'm second-guessing myself. Am I only down on Star Trek: Expeditions because it's a bland copy of two games I'm kinda sick of? Might you, the cool person of discriminating taste who is reading my review, enjoy ST:E if you haven't played Arkham Horror or Pandemic; will you get a few yucks out of mechanics that are (to you anyway) fresh and exciting?

I dunno. In a lot of ways Expedition feels like first season Riker, where it's got some stuff you've seen before and some other stuff you haven't seen, but overall it's just kind of bland and not really living up to it's potential. This game needs to grow a beard, get out there, and be it's own deal. Maybe play the trumpet or something.

Well I gotta review this thing so now that you've read my doubts for a couple of paragraphs I guess I should get into it. So, lemme remind you that all my reviews assume that you have passing familiarity with the game mechanics and components.

Theme

I went into Star Trek: Expeditions completely cold, knowing nothing about it. So I was super-surprised when I saw Chris Pine and the Crew of the Sexy New Enterprise (that's what I've come to call them, it's sort of like Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) from the 2009 movie on the box. I figured that the game would be Star Trek Next Generation/DS9/Voyager. And frankly I thought that Trek 2009 is a terrible choice for the Star Trek theme, because there has only been one movie with these characters.

Now don't get me wrong here, I thought the new Star Trek movie was pretty darn good. And I'm not a Star Trek super-fan (called a Trekker or a Trekkie...I can never remember, one makes them mad and one they are ok with. So if you're a Star Trek super-fan, please pick the correct one for me.) I watched Next Generation and DS9 on TV occassionally, and missed a lot of episodes. But I've still spent a lot of time with crews from the TV shows. Now, I've also seen the Star Trek 2009 movie once. So I've spent about 2 hours with the movie characters, as compared to dozens of hours with the television cew. And to be honest I don't have the same sense of attachment to New Kirk and New Spock as I do to Picard or Sisko or even Chief O'Brien. In fact, you could go so far as to say that I don't really care that much about them. But here they are, front and center in this game. And it's like, who gives a hoot? I barely know this crew. They all spent 90 percent of their Enterprise time furrowing their brows and being intense, or falling, or shooting. Those important beats that make a character stay with you (Sisko being a total badass, one of Picard's "screw you" speeches to Q, Riker being a super-awesome pimp all the time) haven't happened for the new Enterprise crew. Except maybe the new Dr. McCoy. He established himself pretty quickly.

Anyway the story of Star Trek expeditions is that a neutral planet is having political stability issues, ecological issues, and medical issues. So it's up to the crew of the Enterprise to show up and sort all this nonsense out, otherwise this planet might join the Klingon Empire. Oh and also one Klingon ship is hanging out in orbit too, and he doesn't like you meddling with this potential ally planet and decides to blow you up.

Let me just start by saying that I don't really like the game's actual linkage between theme and mechanics because, in a whole bunch of cases, THERE ISN'T ONE. Let me give you a typical example: every turn you turn over a "Star Date" card. This card basically acts as the game's decision engine; certain cards have the Klingons fire on you, advance the game toward the end state, or whatever. Well, sometimes the cards say, "Cannot beam this turn." And that's it.

For some reason this really bothered me. Why? Why can't I beam this turn? Can you give me just a basic, "Oh it's an ion storm/asteroid shower/Scotty spilled coffee on the console" reason? Well, the game won't do that. You can't beam and you'd better just start accepting that.

The board is also really tacky. It's just a picture of the Enterprise orbiting a generic planet. At the start of the game, you take a bunch of mission cards and cover the planet with them. So when you start the game, you're standing on the Enterprise orbiting the mysterious Card Planet. Maybe the Card-ashians live on it. Ho ho ho. Anyway, it looks like crap and destroys any sort of "space adventure" feel you might have.

The actual cards themselves just have portraits of extras from the Star Trek movie on them. They don't really feel very Star Trekish to me. There are not any action shots or anything like that. Just pictures of extras looking grim.

One thing I did like is that there are "core missions" that go along with the storyline from earlier. Things like negotiating with the rebels or finding decent fuel sources for the planet's industries, that kind of thing. If you mess up a mission in the chain, or if you take too long to finish a mission, you get different later missions about the same subject. So if you blow your negotiations with the rebels, instead of your next mission being a peacekeeping delegation it might involve protecting the president of the planet from being assassinated. So I appreciate that STE is trying to add a little narrative in there. But it still feels very dry, because of the very simple math-oriented gameplay. Also, there's a chance that you will actually be unable to get a "good" result for a mission (more on this in the gameplay section).

At the end of the game, you tally your scores for each type of mission and get a little blurb of narrative from a reference card, but to be honest it felt completely bloodless. So while I appreciate the branching stories, overall the theme to Star Trek Expeditions seemed very pasted on and not very well integrated with the mechanics.

Gameplay

Actual turn-by-turn play of Star Trek Expeditions goes fairly fast and streamlined. You basically have five choices:

1) You can help the other players in the same space as you by trading items or adding to their abilities.
2) You can shoot at the Klingons if you are on the Enterprise. This is good, because otherwise the Klingons randomly shoot at you and if they blow up the Enterprise, game over.
3) If you're on the planet and in a space with a mission card you can turn over a mission card and attempt to beat the mission.
4) You can hoof it around the planet and beam to or from the Enterprise.
5) You can improve your dude (or dudette in the case of Uhura) by drawing from a deck of improvement cards.

Beating a mission is mechanically very easy, it's just a target number. You take your character's skill, add a pair of six-sided dice rolls, and add your upgrades, and compare it to a target number of the mission. Of course this is a co-op, so they don't make it easy to beat those missions. Oftentimes you need a five or seven on both dice in order to beat the target number.

Did I say a seven on a six-sided die? Yeah, I did, instead of a six the Star Trek Expeditions die has a seven, which is nice. But if it comes up your guy takes a point of damage because he really gave it his all. Usually a point of damage doesn't matter, though.

Anyway like most co-ops the early game is people feeding each other upgrades or upgrading their own characters and deciding whether or not you want to blow up those stupid Klingons. Then you get to executing the plan, but of course the game throws you a few wrinkles and you have to deal with it. Most notably the "Cannot Beam this Turn" cards, which really screw everyone over and come up just a little too often. In our first playthough, we had two missions that we got a "bad" result on simply because Person X said, "Oh I'm bad at these kind of missions, Person Y can do this mission on their turn" and on Person Y's turn they randomly couldn't beam down to the planet to do the mission; the timelines are so strict on many of the missions that waiting even a single turn causes the players to get a bad ending. I was not very happy with this mechanic at all, the beaming mechanic was very important and to have it constantly going on the fritz necause you pulled a weird card just seemed stupid. The mission clock also advances randomly, so sometimes everyone can take a turn and the missions don't count down; other times a couple of guys take a turn and suddenly you're looking at getting the bad endings on a bunch of things because the clock ticked forward for 4 turns worth of time instead of 2 turns.

Look I know that co-op games need random elements but it's really hard to make plans when players might be locked out of moving around or deadlines suddenly jump forward a couple of notches without warning. It really sort of breaks down group cohesion and everyone sort of shrugs their shoulders and says, "Well I'll do my best with XYZ, but who knows the game might just screw us over."

To counter-balance this I really do feel like the game threw a bunch of different threats at the players (the Klingon ship, the three different mission types when most characters are only realistically going to attempt one or two types, etc.) and made you scramble to defeat them. There was plenty of table talk and that's important in a cooperative game. Sort of how like, in Pandemic, you are trying to lock down a certain kind of virus while all the other viruses are getting even tougher, and one player nervously says "uh guys if you do that won't we have this other problem?" and everyone has to readjust.

But ultimately I just felt that the dry, math-heavy nature of the missions combined with the capriciousness of the game engine made for a mediocre play experience. It's definitely not a BAD experience, but it is kind of bloodless and euro-gamey. Some people don't mind that at all and those people will enjoy Expeditions.

Summary

If you read my introductory paragraph you pretty much already know how I feel about this game. I felt using the crew of the Sexy New Enterprise was a mistake as they simply do not resonate as well as the other crews. The theme is tenuously tied to the mechanics. The game can sometimes feel dry, capricious, and mathy. On the positive side, the game is good at presenting multiple threat vectors at the players, and making everyone at the table work together to overcome the game systems. It's not a bad game but I don't think it's a must-try either.

So there you go. I didn't get to make a "set phasers for fun" joke and plus I think someone already did that. So I'm just going to say, as always, thanks for reading.

Arkham Horror, The Steven Seagal of Board Games

I was watching the Steven Seagal movie Urban Justice the other day and there was an action scene where Steven Seagal kicked a guy in the balls. It reminded me of Arkham Horror.

Ok, you're thinking. I did not start reading this board game review to have this guy talk about Steven Seagal movies and balls. And I agree it's not a typical start. But give me a chance to explain.

So: Urban Justice. Steven Seagal plays a guy whose son is killed, and he is looking for the killer. As often happens in Steven Seagal movies, he gets in fights with dudes. And in one of these fights, he kicks a guy in the balls. And then kicks him again, and again, and again. It was crazy. I sat there watching the screen in open-mouthed amazement. Just when I thought it was over, WHAM! Another set of lace-marks to the sack. Steven Seagal kicks a guy in the balls ELEVEN TIMES IN A ROW.

Now I love a good ball-kicking. I grew up in the Eighties where groin trauma was a national pastime. If you were the antagonist in an Eighties comedy, you were probably going to take one to the taint, usually at the climax of the film. Eighties comedies always had these endings: the underdogs win and the bad guys end up doubled over at the prom or during the big game or whatever, holding their crotch and making an exaggerated, "Ouch! My balls!" face while everyone laughs at them. To which I say: Sorry, school bully and/or snooty preppie, but that's life. Even The Wolfman wasn't safe from a good bag-bonk back then.

But there's such a concept as "too much of a good thing". Steven Seagal kicking a guy in the balls eleven times in a row definitely qualifies. For starters, having to kick a dude 11 times in the sack makes me doubt Seagal's basic competency at ball-kicking. Look, I've seen America's Funniest Home Videos enough to know that even a five year old can drop a guy with a good whack to the sack. So if you need eleven kicks, not only do you lack power but you lack technique. I would have to say that, AT MOST, a person would have to kick a guy in the balls 3 times (one kick to the frank and one for each bean), and that's only if they were a super-precise Sack Sniper with virtually no power behind their toe. Even an amateur nutcracker like myself should need 2 at the outside.

But most importantly, eleven ball kicks doesn't add anything to a fight scene. The first kick is cool, you're like "dude that guy took one to the boys! Ouch!" After about the second or third kick, it loses a lot of meaning. The scene loses it's visceral quality, and the dude's yelps of pain aren't funny or exciting anymore. Pardon the expression, but it ceases to make an impact.

Now this brings me around to Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror is a pretty good cooperative game with a decent narrative where you roam around the board, closing portals and fighting or avoiding monsters. You'll probably enjoy it the first couple of times you play it. And you'll notice that there are a lot of expansions for it, and you might be tempted to buy one. Well, look out buddy. Because those expansions are a lot like Steven Seagal kicking you in the balls. There can be too many and it can drag down the experience without really adding anything.

As with all my reviews I assume that you have read other reviews of Arkham Horror and are somewhat familiar with the rules and components.

Theme

I am going to start with this first because everyone talks about how much they love the theme of this game. Well I am going to be a bit of a contrarian on this one. The theme of Arkham Horror really let me down. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine theme overall, But it's link to "Lovecraftian Adventure" is pretty tenuous. Now I want to take it a moment here to say, I am not an H.P Lovecraft fanboy. People loooove H.P. Lovecraft's writings, but not me. I really enjoy his worlds, but his writing is a bit stilted for me. Still, you got to give old H.P. credit for the whole, "Real horror is knowing you don't matter" theme and the amount of creepy world-building that went on in his short stories. It's a tried and true setting that has been used (or misused - more on this in a minute) for a couple of really good RPGs, so we know the theme works as the basis for a game. Unfortunately, the theme of Arkham Horror is quite the opposite of the Lovecraftian "you are insignificant" theme and the moody psychological horror that accompanies it. In Arkham Horror, you are quite significant. The world (and the game) is quite literally going to end unless you run around the city and close Gates to Another Dimension that are cropping up everywhere. You pick your character, who can be a gangster or a hobo or a nun or a professor of the occult, and get to work. To be honest it sounds like something out of the Twilight Zone. And I should love silly shit like this. Unfortunately that description on the cover, "Lovecraftian Adventure", keeps eating at me. This game's theme doesn't embody that phrase. It's like if you bought a game that claimed to be about city planning, and it was actually about managing the employees in town hall. Sure, I mean the trappings of city planning are there, and dealing with town hall staffing is part of city planning, but it's not really inimical to the genre. In my experience, when someone talks about city planning they expect to be zoning areas, not hiring property inspectors.

I guess my problem with this game's theme is that it is not a reflection of Lovecraftian literature. It's a reflection of Call of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game based on Lovecraftian literature. So it's double-distorted. Now maybe you don't know what I am talking about when I bring up Call of Cthulhu. Well, let me elaborate a bit. Call of Cthulu is a roleplaying game set in the Lovecraftian mythos. The game was first published in 1981, so it's been around a long time and is very popular. I've been playing it for about 20 years on and off and in my experience, Call of Cthulhu roleplaying games feature stories that tend to be a lot pulpier than Lovecraft stories, because the players know that they are in a Lovecraft universe (even if their characters don't) and so tend to be much more cautious. (Being gamers, they also tend to be more heavily armed.) And also, gamer personality types come into play. So what you end up with is a sort of weird combination of gaming tropes and Lovecraftian horrors.

Now, it's not surprising that Arkham Horror is based off the tropes of Call of Cthulhu. Hell, it has the Call of Cthulhu logo in the corner of the box, and it was originally published in 1987 by the same people who published Call of Cthulhu. So I would have to be pretty dumb to act surprised about the similarities. It's just a little disappointing. And I hate to say it, but it brings up a problem that I have been seeing for a while: the world "Lovecraftian" becoming synonymous with "Call of Cthulhu", which is a very limited, super-pulpy take on the Mythos. But most of Lovecraftian writings have no resemblance to what takes place in Call of Cthulhu. Oftentimes, Call of Cthulhu is horror pulp with a sanity pool. It's not nearly as moody, weird, labyrinthine, or -- let's face it here -- original as it's source material. When Call of Cthulhu came out it was relatively young in the life of RPGs, and it had a huge number of influences from the biggest game in town, Dungeons and Dragons. Some of it's mechanics did not work for adventures as written, yet were carried over. Some of it's mechanics were developed better by games that came after it, for example the sanity system in the RPG Unknown Armies. So it's sad that the tropes of Call of Cthulhu game, and not the original writings on which it is based, are making it into our collective gaming culture.

Look, I'm not stupid. A "straight Lovecraft" game would be a hell of a design challenge, because so much of an H.P. Lovecraft story takes place in the protagonist's headspace. And board games are not, as a rule, going to get scares or even minor chills, so it's not like I'm pissed off because Arkham Horror isn't scary. In fact, the only tabletop game I've played that even gave me the creeps was Dread, a roleplaying game. And that only worked because the GM did a hell of a lot of work establishing tone (we played in a storage room that he had decorated in plastic, Dexter style, with construction lighting), and the limited mechanics are basically made to build tension and suspense. So I know that what I am asking for is a tall order. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're going to throw around "Lovecraftian" on a box, shouldn't it mean something more than a horror game with a sanity pool? Or is that what people want? I just feel like H.P. Lovecraft would look at this game, with monsters running around in the streets and magic spells and a hobo with a shotgun and dimensional gates shooting up all over the place, and be like, "Uh you guys know my stories are about a world that, on the surface, APPEARS normal? Right?" I dunno, maybe I'm being a neckbeard about this.

Having said that, the pulpy horror theme works fine and is richly integrated into the board, the cards, and the player aids. This is a nice looking game with good production quality. I don't know if I'd call it "Lovecraftian Adventure", though.

Gameplay

I have been playing Arkham Horror with 2 different groups for 3 years. Initially, both groups started with the base game. At this point, I thought Arkham Horror was a moderately fun co-op game. I liked the fact that there was no dedicated "bad guy" player, and I liked the fact that the game tended to ramp up the frantic level as the game progressed. It had enough good qualities that I felt I could recommend it.

Then came the expansions. And, as with all games, repetition makes the bad elements stand out more. So 3 years later, I would not recommend this game as a purchase. I would say that if you had a chance to play it for the first time with only the base game or one expansion, you should try it out. But overall it's not worth owning.

My first negative toward Arkham Horror is my feeling that the game doesn't have a lot of interactivity with the other players, even though you are all working against the game's system. You are kind of off in your own world for a good portion of the game. Sure, you might meet up with another player a couple of times to use your special ability to help them or trade equipment, or have them take care of a monster for you. But overall you don't feel like you are "in the same boat" with them. Whenever we would lose the game, none of us felt that our individual contributions had mattered; we'd felt like we'd had a "tough setup" or that variance had gotten the better of us. I think a good co-op game should have a moment where you point at your friend's wife and scream, "Well we might have won if she wasn't so stupid!" Just kidding, but I think you get my sentiment -- that you should feel like players have an influence on the game and that there are "critical moments" when you all have to come together and make it happen. That rarely happens in Arkham Horror.

The second problem I have experienced, and I alluded to back at the beginning of the review with my Steven Seagal ball-kicking story, is that Arkham Horror's many expansions, when used together, degrade the fun of the game. You have to moderate your use of them, which is not immediately obvious to someone who is purchasing them with the intent of, "the more of these I get, the better the game will be." That hasn't been my experience at all. With one expansion in play, Arkham Horror is fun and usually better. With two it's a more chaotic game, but still can be entertaining. With three, it's a bloated, worthless mess. How? it's best if I just list the why of it here:

1) The new rules in the expansions frequently follow a "debt" rule model. That is to say, if they give you short term advantage, they give you a long-term disadvantage, or vice-versa. Do you want to join a cult? In the short term it will give you an advantage, but in the long term a disadvantage. Do you want to complete a job? It will give you a short term disadvantage for a reward. Take a injury or madness card instead of dying, and it's a short term advantage for a long-term disadvantage. Ignore the Kingsport gates for a short-term advantage and long-term disadvantage. I know that many rules in games boil down to some form of risk-reward management, but Arkham Horror is just so damn blatant about it.
2) The expansions, almost as a rule, make the game harder or at least more swingy. Run too many of them and there's so many variables in play that you can have a really easy game or an impossibly difficult one, based on nothing more than chance. I like randomness, but Arkham Horror with too many expansions hits the tipping point. It becomes a chaotic mess.
3) The core of Arkham Horror gameplay is closing or sealing gates. This is the primary win condition. The secondary win condition is to defeat the big monster that comes through the gates at the end of the game, in a fight that should be heavily stacked against the players. Only 3 of the expansions effect these conditions in any form. One of them makes the Gates have an additional effect. One of them makes the end battles a little more unpredictable and interesting. And one makes it impossible to permanently seal gates. None of them affect the mechanics of sealing gates at all. You still enter the space with the gate, go through, enter a special space where you draw 2 cards over 2 turns, and then pop back to try to seal the gate. This never changes and a good portion of your game will be spent in these special spaces and you know what? There's absolutely no changes to this process, ever, in any expansion. Go in the gate and draw 2 cards and come out and perform a skill check. It never changes.
4) Arkham Horror can be a little bit fiddly even with the base game. With the expansions, it becomes a "Whoops! I forgot..." game. There are just too many triggered effects and too many cards and variables on the table. Every turn you start to make a mistake. "Whoops! I forgot I should have gotten some money when Pete cashed in that gate trophy, because we're business partners. Whoops! I forgot that there's a mythos card that affects this combat result. Whoops! I forgot to roll for my bank loan. Whoops! I forgot to apply my madness card/apply that Herald's effect/remember that the stores are closed from the terror track." There's just too much to keep track of consistently.
5) Earlier I mentioned the lack of player interactivity. It becomes even worse when the board is expanded. I didn't even cross the space of another investigator at all during one game (played with both Dunwitch and Kingsport).
6) More expansions = more things to consider on a player's turn = longer turns = more downtime for everyone else.

Now I've played the game in too many combinations to tell you which expansions are good ones, and which are not, but I can tell you that adding more than 2 to your game is not a good idea. Which, with there being 7 and all, is pretty limiting.

Another problem I feel with the game I mentioned in item number #3 above is that you spend too much time in a mechanically uninteresting area, which is traveling through other dimensions to close gates. This is basically an automated move-and-draw-cards step for your character. It's totally random, and you don't make any interesting decisions while this is happening other than the decision to adjust your character's statistics (which is a gamble, because there's no telling what statistic a given card draw will ask you to use). The more I played Arkham Horror, the more aggravated I got with this particular mechanic -- losing your autonomy is dull regardless of what someone is reading off of a card.

The last thing I want to talk about regarding Arkham Horror's gameplay is it's biggest failure, and that's the amount of gambles in the game and how they are handled. You're always gambling in Arkham Horror - should I attack this monster and possibly lose health and sanity? Should I change my stats around to have a better chance of succeeding under certain conditions? And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with systems that use randomness. But Arkham Horror just leaves too much to chance and, too often, does not have interesting stakes on the gambles. There's a point where a game crosses the line into being a "dicefest" and Arkham Horror is purely in this territory. There are just too many times where your turn ends up being, "which of these random events should I subject myself to?" with no clear idea of what the outcome will be if you win or lose. Do you go to the shop, fight the monster, or have an encounter at The Docks? Fight the monster: you might get a monster trophy or you might get punched in the face, depending on how the dice come up. Go to the shop: you might get something good at the shop or it might be Antiques Roadshow Day and nothing good is for sale, depending on your draw. Go to the Docks: draw a card, anything might happen. For all I know my character will end up fighting a bum for a clue token. It just feels capricious and slapdash all the time, where you can't really plan anything or make a long term strategy. You're constantly reacting to the variance and while this can be fine (I don't enjoy games that are 100 percent procedural) when your choice is to roll the dice one way or roll the dice another way or roll the dice a third way for slightly different losses or gains it starts to blur together. Arkham Horror tends to "chip away" at the player's resources, so oftentimes the stakes on any individual roll aren't very exciting; it's only when you're on your last Health or Sanity point that the outcomes of the rolls become interesting.

Despite really liking Arkham Horror when I first started playing it, the game has not held up.

Components and Narrative

One of the greatest strengths of table-top board games is the fact that they are a social experience, and this experience is greatly heightened by a narrative that can be discussed both during and after the game. In this element, Arkham Horror really shines.

The actual bolt-on narrative elements provided by the text on the cards are actually pretty weak, since there's simply not a lot of space on the cards for text. Also, the fact that each piece of text must stand alone means that the cohesiveness suffers. A little bit of a counterbalance to this is that the cards are tied to particular locations on the board which is nice -- when you visit the Docks you're going to get a card that will specifically mention the foggy waterfront. Thematically and narratively, that's a nice package.

Where the game really shines, though, is the interaction of the various spells, equipment pieces, and conditions that end up on your character. It gets ridiculous pretty quickly. You end up with nuns on motorcycles, performing drive-bys with shotguns on zombies. Or kleptomaniac professors of the occult who just HAVE to deliver packages around the neighborhood to make a few bucks before the end of the world. Or a street magician slowly going insane from trying to fight a flying polyp with magic in the middle of the street. Or some other equally absurd combination. It can be a lot of fun, conceptually, and a great distraction from some of the tedium of the gameplay. I've found that I enjoy discussing what happened during a game of Arkham Horror far more than playing it.

Another item I wanted to mention is the components. They look great. Arkham Horror is a great looking game on the table and that's certainly part of the appeal of boardgames. A big part of this game's Lovecraftian influence is found in it's excellent and moody art -- and in this respect, it is flawless. However, as with all Fantasy Flight Games, the box insert is garbage and you're either going to end up with a tackle box or a zillion little plastic baggies, which increases setup time by A TON.

Sum It All Up, Man

Now that I think about it, Arkham Horror is a lot like Steven Seagal. Both started out and were very successful. Both have gotten very bloated since they originally appeared on the scene. Both have weird spin-offs (Steven Seagal plays blues guitar, and Arkham Horror has Mansions of Madness aka Spookhouse Descent). Both have good qualities and big flaws. Both have been very popular in their fields, but interest has waned somewhat recently.

Here's something funny that I wanted to talk about: after 2 years of playing Arkham Horror I got a chance to play Pandemic and was totally happy with it. Don't get me wrong, Pandemic is not as thematic, not as narratively satisfying, has worse components and sometimes feels like there's only one correct move a turn. However, it does a good job of getting a group around a table together, working at a common goal and talking with each other far more effectively than Arkham Horror, is easier to setup and tear down, and is much shorter, so it doesn't dominate an evening. And I wanted to talk about Pandemic in this summary but then I asked myself, "Ok, how are you going to make this analogy work for Steven Seagal? Who is the Pandemic of Steven Seagal's career?" And then I realized it was Vin Diesel. Think about it. They are similar (both always play characters that don't talk much, are arrogant, beat people up, and glare at everyone a lot) in some core ways while being different (i.e. being tall vs. short, having hair vs. bald, having a soft voice vs. harsh gravelly voice, being a bad actor vs. being a good one, etc.) cosmetically. But their substance is similar. Think about a Steven Seagal role, and I bet Vin Diesel could play it very well, or vice versa. And just like Pandemic, Vin Diesel came onto the scene after Steven Seagal and got more popular than him. So I am able to keep my Steven Seagal analogy! Steven Seagal is Arkham Horror, and Vin Diesel is Pandemic. Yeah, I think that works.

Thanks for reading.

Earth Reborn aka the best Tac-Skirmish Game of All Time

Super Important Author's note: This review is pretty darn indulgent, not to mention long. But I put all this personal crap in at the beginning because I want you to understand that this game's combination of silly theme with amazing skirmish rules has really tugged on my heartstrings. It has quite honestly removed some of the cynicism and sour attitude that I had toward gaming. I am genuinely passionate about this game. Maybe it's the nostalgia or maybe it's the fact that this game's rules rule but I started writing this review and I just couldn't stop. So if you don't want to read through this what-is-in-all-likelihood-way-too-long-of-a-review then please skip to the very last paragraph where I sum it up. If you want to read the borderline gushings of a long-time nerd about a supremely excellent game, keep reading. But don't say I didn't warn you. I probably need to get an editor or something. So, if you're still with me, come with me on a magical journey to the past...

In 1995 I was 19 years old and at the height of my NerdPower(tm). I worked at Software Etc., a now-defunct computer and video-game retail store, as a sales clerk. This basically meant that I had no responsibility to worry about and got to stand around and talk video games with the customers all day (many of whom were actually my friends who came by to visit me at work). Software Etc. also had a "check out" program, where you could check out any piece of media for 2 days in order to keep your product knowledge current. This basically meant that I got an unofficial raise of about 5 bucks an hour, since I never had to buy games. I lived with my parents, went to community college and aced all my classes with zero homework, went to LAN parties (Which were huge events where everyone brought their computers together at a central location to play Doom or Warcraft) and had a blast.

In addition, there was a local game store called All Fun N' Games where some of the funnest, funniest, and all around great guys used to gather for all kinds of gaming. This was back in the halcyon early days of Magic The Gathering and it quite literally dominated 90 percent of the gaming store's floorspace and playtime, with a few miscellaneous roleplaying games running in the back of the store and the occasional board game. The place was a rollicking delight - everyone was having a grand old time, all the time, and the atmosphere was reminiscent of that long-running and loved sitcom, Cheers, with a cast of happy regulars and lots of laughs had by all. And to continue that analogy, I was the frickin' Norm of that game store. Everyone would shout out "Daaaaaave" when I entered the store, I had the Power 9 for Magic, I ran various fun RPG campaigns that everyone liked, and occasionally I would bring in a somewhat obscure game that everyone enjoyed playing (like Dark Tower, HeroQuest, or Blood Bowl - all of which are still sitting in my garage, keeping the spiders company) and we would have a grand old time.

One of the games that got heavy rotation was a store copy of Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel. At first I thought it was a low-rent Warhammer 40k ripoff, but after I played a few games I started really enjoying it. It was a basic "move-and-shoot" of a rotating Overlord-type "bad guy" player vs. the rest of the "good guy" table with a nice twist: namely, that as a "good guy" you were playing with teams of 2-3 other players who were just as likely to screw you over as to help you! In addition, there was a fun campaign mode where your dudes (called DoomTroopers - to me that always sounded like a StormTrooper got a promotion) got better gear as the campaign progressed. The game's rules weren't spectacular, but it's structure led to a lot of good-natured ribbing and some real "take that!" moments that we all enjoyed.

Another game we all enjoyed was Warhammer Quest, which could be played without a Big Bad by letting the game generate the dungeon with a deck of cards. There was also a campaign system, as well as some sweet-ass scenarios. It was a perfect dungeon stomp when you had two hours to kill and didn't want to play Yet Another Game of Magic.

And so it went...days at community college and homework, nights having nerdfun. Incredible times. About the only thing negative I can say about this point in my life was that (not surprisingly, being a Wizard of Nerd and all) I wasn't getting laid. As far as everything else went, it was perfect....just the sort of way you want to close out your teenage years.

Sadly, by 1997 it was all over. I had transferred to a real college in a different town and was feeling isolated and alone. I had sold my Magic cards (value of them today: over $40,000) for what seemed like good money, to buy a crappy Ford Bronco 2. I had lost my NerdPower(tm) and was instead trying to have a "college experience", which meant going to weak-ass parties with people I didn't really like to do stuff I really didn't enjoy. I was expending a good deal of my energy chasing women who had no romantic interest in me and never would. The Golden Age of Nerditry was over. Cold hard reality had stepped in.

The years rolled by. I dropped out of the gaming scene, or played console games. The game store closed, and the friends I had made there got married, divorced, became lawyers, became fathers. And then in 2007, something magical happened. I walked back into a local game store and I saw a big-ass box on the shelf. The box was covered in fantasy art that wouldn't have been out of place on the side of a van in 70s. And on that box, in big bold custom print, were the words: DESCENT: JOURNEYS IN THE DARK. It looked like Warhammer Quest. I flipped it over and looked at the back of the box. IT WAS WARHAMMER QUEST, ONLY BETTER. HOLY CRAP. I was instantly transported back to 1995.

I bought it. I called all of my old gamer buddies who I didn't get to see much anymore. "Come over and play this awesome board game. It will be just like the old days!" I exclaimed. We played Descent. Some of my older game store buddies came by. I would get them to play Descent. Our first dozen play throughs were a blast and sparked a brief gaming revival, but there was something missing. I guess you can't go back again, I thought. Descent is a fun game but it somehow manages to be bloated, fiddly, and exciting all at the same time. There were always rule issues. Some of us wanted a more epic feel to Descent, so we tried Road to Legend, and after 50 hours realized it was really quite bad and switched over to Dungeons and Dragons - an old standby. Eventually I realized that Descent is a good game, but it was not as great as I had thought when viewed through my 1995-tinged glasses. I bought a few more board games, enjoyed some, didn't enjoy others, started to exit the hobby again. Commitments began catching up with my buddies, too, and we got together less and less.

And then in 2011, something magical happened. I walked back into a game store and I saw a big-ass box on the shelf. The box was covered in sci-fi art that wouldn't have been out of place on a game book in the late 80s. And on that box, in big bold custom print, were the words: EARTH REBORN. It looked like gritty, post-apocalyptic Mutant Chronicles. I flipped it over and looked at the back of the box. IT WAS MUTANT CHRONICLES, ONLY BETTER. HOLY CRAP.

I was out the door with Earth Reborn under my arm and a smile on my face. Checked the game on BoardGameGeek - good reviews and some good tips for getting the most out of the game. Looked like a winner. Called up my old gaming buddy buddy, and drove to his place. "This is going to be just like when we played Mutant Chronicles!" I crowed. "Hardly. Looks like that old video game Bad Dudes meets Mad Max," he retorted. Well he wasn't sold yet. We setup and played the first scenario.

"That was interesting, but no Mutant Chronicles. Way too simple!" he remarked.

"Let's try the second scenario," I replied cheerfully. "Each one adds more rules than the last."

"I dunno, man, I have a feeling that this is going to suck," he replied.

"Come on, dude! Look at all the crap on the cards we didn't use!" I countered.

We tried the second scenario.

"That was a little bit better. Let's try the third scenario," my buddy said.

We tried the third scenario, and once shooting rules were put into the game it opened up like a lotus blossom. We raced through the fourth and fifth scenarios that very night. I called my mate and told her that I was going to be late. His girlfriend was working late at her job, and when she stumbled in at 3:30am we were just finishing up the fifth scenario and seriously considering setting up for the sixth.

It turns out, you CAN go back again...if the game is good enough. Descent wasn't. Earth Reborn, though...that's another matter. This is a game that makes me feel like it's 1995 all over again with a ridonkulous theme, awesome minis, and the tightest skirmish rules in the universe. As with all my reviews, I assume you're a knowledgeable dude or dudette who has read at least a few other "breakdown" reviews and have a passing familiarity with the components and ruleset. Let's DO THIS!

Theme

I watched this French film called Immortal once. It was a science fiction film about a future New York with a giant pyramid hanging over it and pretentious poetry. It was a completely jumbled mess, but it had some awesome imagery in the form of a future New York and cybernetic Egyptian gods and a sexy naked alien chick (the kind Captain Kirk would chase around). I thought it sucked, for the most part, but I liked the fact that the movie's general vibe was that of a colorful, trashy science fiction from the 70s. As I reflected upon Immortal, I realized it reminded me of the (much better) movie The 5th Element, which was another colorful French science fiction film that also straddled the line between being ridiculous and being awesome. And I realized that French people kind of get the whole "RadiDumb" (that's "radical" and "dumb" mashed together) vibe. Now you're probably asking yourself what the heck RadiDumb is, besides a portmanteau that I just made up. Well, it's a sort of trashy aesthetic that you can see in a LOT of American media from the late 80s through the mid 90s, such as Commando (Arnold Swartzenegger cracks one liners while knife-fighting a Australian Freddy-Mercury lookalike in a chain-mail vest), Mortal Kombat (multi-colored, muscly ninjas freeze each other, throw spears into each other and literally rip each others' spines out while gobs of blood fly freely) and, to a lesser degree, Independence Day (all-powerful death-ray wielding alien invaders defeated by Macintosh computer virus and a solitary pilot's suicide attack). RadiDumb basically keeps anything interesting or entertaining in the movie, regardless of how little sense it makes in narrative context. Unfortunately the whole RadiDumb aesthetic sort of petered out in the late 90s (although at the time of this writing, Fast Five, a RadiDumb movie par excellence, is kicking butt at the box office). But if you grew up steeped in RadiDumb (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the RPG Rifts, the movie Speed, etc) then you'll probably appreciate it.

Earth Reborn's theme is RadiDumb. Really RadiDumb. Divisively RadiDumb. The designer of the game and writer of the theme is French and he has tapped into the Plane of RadiDumb to deliver this game. At this point in the review I would like you to take a quiz to see if you or your gaming friends will be able to swing the theme of Earth Reborn.

1) When watching the movie Sniper with Tom Berenger, I felt that the element missing was:
a) I have not seen the movie Sniper with Tom Berenger, or have no opinion.
b) More realism in the sniping sequences.
c) Massive, heaving, sweat-soaked breasts.

2) The famous "Thunderdome" sequence of "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" could have been improved by:
a) Nothing, it's a good scene. (or I haven't seen it).
b) Getting rid of those stupid elastic straps, how dumb was that?
c) Zombies.

3) Two robots fighting is...
a) Ok, I guess.
b) Stupid.
c) Are we talking a fist fight here, a la Real Steel? Or a Battletech-style blastathon like in Robot Jox? Because either way, I've got miniatures.

4) Extra credit question: You've just fought your way through a hundred Nazis to the top of an Aztec pyramid to stop an occult rite that will plunge mankind into a thousand-year Reich. As you blast the head Nazi (dressed in full SS leathers overlayed with golden Aztec priest garb) in the chest with a bazooka, rocketing him hundreds of feet into the air where he explodes in a massive fireball, you shout...
a) Nothing. You've put on your shades and are already slo-mo walking back down the pyramid, and you don't even turn around and look at the explosion.
b) "Bazooka for the win!"
c) "Turns out Montezuma's Revenge...was a missile, Goebbels!"

SCORING THE QUIZ
Give yourself 0 points for every A) answer, 1 point for every C) answer, and negative one million points for every B) answer.
0-2 points: You might like the theme of Earth Reborn.
3+ points: You will like the theme of Earth Reborn.
Less than 0: You will not like the theme of Earth Reborn.

This theme is bonkers. There's a global apocalypse caused by global warming, Greenpeace, Google, China, and the United States. You're reading all of this stuff backstory about a super-polluting petroleum substitute (it pollutes 20x worse than gasoline!?!? what does it do, continously shoot a mixture of dog shit and radon out of the vehicle's tailpipe?!?!?!) and Google and Greenpeace (er, "Coogle" and "Greenpiece") inventing floating cities and crap and you're basically thinking to yourself, "What's next?" And what's next is Frankenstein-scientists living in a bomb shelter under Salem and making zombies. What's next is culty religious military leaders with automatic drilling machines and power-armor. What's next is enough wacky ideas to make 20 expansions. The whole vibe is one of cheerful thrown-together insanity, where the designer found a way to keep anything interesting in the game while discarding anything boring.

Special note must be given to the characters, who take RadiDumb concepts and push them to the limit. There's a 500-year old intelligent horny zombie called "Franc Einstein". One of the bad guys wears a gas mask and has Irritable Bowel Syndrome (seriously, he can get victory points for his team by taking a dump during a mission...I guess that's how you spell "relief" after The Bomb). There's Monica Vasquez, a female sniper with enormous tits who dresses like she belongs on the cover of Military Low-Rider Magazine (we call her "McJuggs" at our table, and for the rest of this review.) Jack Saw is an old, homeless-guy-looking zombie with...you guessed it...a huge buzzsaw for an arm. And, my personal favorite, a guy dressed entirely head-to-toe in high-tech ninja garb and dual-wielding two pistols whose name is...James Woo. He could have been anyone under that suit but he's legendary Hong Kong director John Woo...Hong Kong Action Cinema meets Japanese Ninja. Nice.

Earth Reborn's post-apocalyptic world is just an excuse to have a grab-bag of fun concepts mashed together. In this goofy world, nobody has to worry about radiation, starving, or moral quandaries. It's very four-color comic book with just the right amount of quirky, fun touches. The bad guy's zombie serum glows a putrid green. The zombies are dirty creepers. The good guys wear puce-colored armor and are hygienic, except of course for the hint of manly stubble growing on the face of Nick Bolter. The whole game feels like it should have come out in 1993, back when people weren't ashamed to try making stuff this awesome. This is the kind of gonzo comic-book world that I would have enjoyed the hell out when I was a young man. Wait, who I am kidding? I still enjoy the hell out of it.

Components

A big part of the appeal of tabletop board games is the components. I know some of you reading this are ok with terrible-looking games on your table if the gameplay holds up, but not me. If your game looks like ugly garbage I am 100 percent not interested, sorry folks that's just the way I am. So, it was nice to see that for your 80 bucks, Earth Reborn's quality is actually BETTER than the 800 pound gorilla of components, Fantasy Flight. A bold statement, but here's what jumped out at me:

* The mini sculpts are excellent and pre-primed for you.
* The rulebook is expansive, has a ton of examples and a great appendix.
* An actual box insert that is functional and works great! *gasp*
* Tons and tons and tons and tons of tiles to build maps.
* Great player aids - mini-gamemaster screens for each player! A cloth bag for your order tiles! Nice work.
* Cards are standard size so they can be sleeved - and there is extra space in the box to store sleeved cards. Excellent.

So overall the components are great, except for three stinkers:

* The board pieces can be very dark, with a low contrast between the room's floor and a room's walls, so sometimes it's hard to see a room's walls.
* The cards are gaudy and borderline ugly. Don't get me wrong - they are 100 percent perfectly functional, but they have a pukey color scheme.
* They don't actually tell you how to use the insert, you have to go online and get the guide. The rulebooks states that repackaging the game is "the game within the game"...but come on guys, that's a crap excuse. Trying to figure out how to store all the cool stuff you gave me is annoying, not fun.

Of the three stinkers, only the first one is a "real" problem that can effect your enjoyment of the game. The fact that the tiles can be overly dark and force you to miss a wall will get you into a situation where you say, "Oh I'm going to do this and go here" and you can't because there's a wall you didn't see before. That's gotten me a few times. The other two are not bad. The cards being gaudy as all get-out doesn't change the fact that they are well-designed (from a rules standpoint) and have all the information you need. The only reason I'm bringing it up is because I like good-looking components and the cards fail the test. If you can tolerate crappy meeples, though, you can tolerate the cards. The fact that you have to go download the game's storage box solution is a pain, but not too bad because you have to go download a file one time, after that it's no problem.

At the end of the day I am super-satisfied with the components of Earth Reborn, and I am an admitted components snob. So good job here Z-Man and Ludically.

Gameplay

Ok here's where we get down to it. I've been playing games for over 25 years of all types. Video, board, role-playing...it doesn't matter. I like games and I like playing them.

Out of all the games I have experienced, Earth Reborn is the best skirmish board game with the best rules system I have ever played.

See that sentence above? I let it sit on my computer for 3 days, just to make sure it wasn't something that I wrote in a passionate moment. "I'll go back and edit it to something less absolute later," I told myself. Nope. It's going to stand as written. This game is a frickin' marvel of engineering. The rules are thematic, tight, are complex enough to simulate a great deal of situations yet remain understandable by anyone. What's incredible about this game is that the rules work better than skirmish computer games, an amazing feat! If you've played Jagged Alliance 2 or X-Com, you'll know exactly what it "feels" like to play Earth Reborn except there are even more interesting options available!

I am sure some people read about the "44 page rulebook" and feel like the whole game system is just an overcomplicated Rube Goldberg nightmare that's going to run away from them. Maybe they saw the Jack Saw character card with the icons all over it and were like, "This thing must play like garbage and have 40 minute turns." Well it doesn't.

For starters let's talk about the 44 page rulebook. Man, 44 pages. Sound intimidating. I've heard people call it "bloated" but I don't think that's the case. I would call it "stuffed". Every new rule that is introduced in the game has a couple of pages of examples given to it, minimum. There's diagrams and such showing applications of each rule. There are corner cases of rules clearly illustrated. There's a bunch of art all over the place. And there's a 4 page reference in the back that explains all of the iconography on all of the cards for you, in case you get confused or forget something. It's super-helpful. So, even though the rulebook has the same gaudy graphic design as the cards, the actual content is excellent. And it's not really 44 pages, not even close. If it were written like most gaming rulebooks it would probably be 15 pages or so. But the extra pages flesh out concepts, making it a breezy read that shouldn't be intimidating at all.

Secondly, the rules are modular and designed in very discrete chunks. This makes them both easy to memorize and is used to great effect by the game's scenario system. Each scenario introduces 1 or 2 new rules. Now I have to tell you, when first I played the game I thought this was pretty weird. My friend and I were having fun, but it seemed like we had too much of a particular resource or that certain concepts really didn't seem to matter, and there was a bunch of stuff on the board and on the cards that we didn't understand. However, a few scenarios later you would have an "ah-ha!" moment and realize that the whole system meshed together beautifully. For example, in the first scenario my buddy and I were discussing the ridiculous amount of Command Points (the game's primary currency for accomplishing actions) that we had available to us and wondering why we had so much. In the second game, we found out that you can bid away those points to interrupt your opponent's actions. Ah-ha! So that's why you get "more than you need". You are expected to bid them away...but not too many, or you'll not be able to perform critical actions! Cool. There's tons more examples of this as you work through the scenarios.

Thirdly, the rules are very cohesive. Rule systems often relate to each other very easily. For example, shooting and close combat use the same dice and basically even the same steps. However, the rules are done in such a way that you get very different outcomes for each kind of attack. For example, close combat of a wimp vs. a badass will have the wimp taking damage even when it is the wimp who is the attacker. In a straight-up brawl the badass is just going to mop the floor with the wimp based on the way the melee combat works in Earth Reborn. BUT if the wimp sneaks up on the badass they have a much easier time of it. This same basic thing is used for the shooting system with a little tweaking and a step moved around, and it totally simulates the fact that hitting people is tougher when they are far away, but it's never impossible if you can see them. But it's basically the same amount of dice rolls as close combat. It's elegant and gives the results you would expect. Sometimes when I play skirmish games I feel like there's not enough difference between the shooting and the melee. Not in Earth Reborn. Plus, the rules tend to work consistently. If you've ever played a game where each rules subsystem is completely different from the other and experienced all the confusion that can bring, you're going to love Earth Reborn's cohesive rules. If you've played a miniatures game where a bunch of stuff doesn't "make sense", you're going to love Earth Reborn's rules foundation, because 99 percent of the time you'll use the rule and say, "Oh yeah, that's how that would work". Creeping up on a zombie with a buzz-saw for a hand is the way to beat them. Attacking that same zombie from the front, even with an awesome weapon, is going to be a tougher proposition, and the rules model this. Also, the game's interrupt system (which is called Dueling) is frickin' awesome, because it is very flexible and keeps a lot of turn-based weirdness from happening. The classic example of turn-based weirdness in a game is one where on your opponent's turn he attacks your ranged specialist dude in close combat, then moves away to an inaccessible area. It's like, "He up and stabbed me and now he's hiding in a locked room and I didn't get a shot off, how the heck did this happen?" Well in this game you totally get to pop a shot off at him, if you willing to pay for it and have done a little planning.

Another thing I love is the game's use of iconography. For example, you can search rooms in the game. All of the rooms on the board have little symbols on them, and you can retrieve cards from the equipment deck that match the icons on the room. So you're never going to search and find a machine gun in the toilet (unless you attend one of my parties! ska-doosh). It's an easy system that adds complexity without forcing you to memorize gobs of special case rules. In fact, the game constructs a language entirely out of these icons and color-coded sections, letting you know where and when you can use character abilities, equipment, etc. It looks intimidating as hell but after reading like 2 paragraphs in the rules you'll be able to decode any of them at a glance with 90 percent accuracy. And the back of the rulebook has "real English" sentences that explain each icon's effect, so if you are a little unsure of how an icon strip is supposed to be read, you can use the rulebook as a reference. Also, on the player screens, they have an icon decoder. So it's pretty awesome, doesn't take up a lot of space on the board or on the cards, and adds a lot to the game without forcing you to remember a bunch of esoteric rules.

This game has so much chrome it's like they've already included a couple of expansions in the box. I mean, the basic rules of move, melee, shoot, search, and special abilities is great but the main rulebook includes rules for jamming communications, torturing dudes, oversized models, cutting power to a building, etc. Which is totally nuts. As far as I know there's no game made that has rules for taking someone prisoner and torturing them to get information. Unless it's a game called The Bush Presidency.

The last thing I wanted to point out is that this game takes traditional Eurogame themes and uses them in ways that I didn't expect and often with amazing results. There's a worker placement mechanic (in the form of orders), there's auctions (bidding to interrupt your opponent), there's even sort of a simple action queue. I gotta be honest - usually I am not a fan of these mechanics. They can feel very dry. But in Earth Reborn they really work well, because there are so many interesting choices to make on any given turn. This game never just "plays itself", or gives you the "here are 3 choices, but 2 of them aren't really viable". Worker placement and bidding are the CORE of some games, but here they're just another game element that helps tell the story about the time that McJuggs was chased through an abandoned nuclear facility by a horny zombie.

If there's one thing that I can criticize the game for, it's the fact that the modular game board takes a bit to setup. Like 20 minutes. That hurts. But despite this one small flaw, I'm going to go back to my original statement and say that these are the best skirmish rules I've ever played in a skirmish game. Sorry, Mutant Chronicles. Even your double-dealing coolness and awesome campaign system can't touch the buttery goodness of Earth Reborn.

Narrative

A little while back I reviewed Mansions of Madness. At the time I was pretty lukewarm on it, but I liked the scenario system and felt there was a lot of potential there. At the end of the review I said something along the lines of "if they can get their act together for an expansion, they will have the premiere narrative boardgame." Well I'm taking that back. Sorry, Mansions of Madness - you're a punk that gets no love, no matter how good your first expansion, because your core rules just aren't up to snuff. The king of narrative boardgames is Earth Reborn.

I think it's best to show just what kind of awesome nonsense happens during Earth Reborn. So, here are Actual Things That Have Happened during some games of Earth Reborn:

* McJuggs the sniper is unarmed and trapped in a building by Jack Saw, who slowly but implacably cuts through 3 doors and a solid wall to get to her. Luckily she escapes into the wilderness by smashing through a door when Jack Saw was one paltry square away.

* After the bad guy Salemites start a countdown timer to launch a missile that will eradicate NORAD, operative James Woo desperately searches a room for the building's wiring schematics. He finds them and uses them to shut down the power to the missile room for one turn, allowing Commander Nick Bolter to heroically enter the room guns blazing and stop the missile launch.

* Jeff Deeler has to take a crap (which will get his team points) but was blocked by a mine laid in front of the bathroom. "To hell with it," Jeff thinks, steps on the mine to try to get to the crapper, and is blown to pieces. Now that's what I call explosive diarrhea!

More than any other game I've played, every game of Earth Reborn tells a story. And it's not a really boring story, like for example Descent ("Some monsters came out...and were struck down by the heroes. Then more monsters came...and were smashed by the heroes. Then a rock fell on SteelHorn's head.") It's usually pretty darn compelling. The immense flexibility of the system and the wild permutations of characters, equipment, and scenarios, as well as the "quasi-realistic" grounding of the rules makes for fun and interesting tales. This is the kind of game where you're always saying, "Yeah, that was awesome when X did Y!" except you're saying it every few turns about the scenario you're currently playing!

I hate to keep going back to the well on this one, but if you've ever played Jagged Alliance 2 or X-Com or Mutant Chronicles you know exactly what I am talking about. After every battle you can look back and see the clear narrative that emerges from each encounter. Now I am going to break out of a review about Earth Reborn for a second to talk about my favorite narrative moment in a skirmish game, which just so happens to belong to X-Com: UFO Defense (called UFO:Enemy Unknown in Europe). X-Com is a squad based skirmish game and coincidentally, my favorite skirmish game before Earth Reborn. It concerns a quasi-military task force called "X-COM" fighting off an insidious UFO invasion: a sort of X-Files meets Black Hawk Down. This aside is a little long but stay with me. In X-Com, I had a "investigate crashed UFO" mission go really sour on me. My Skyranger transport craft landed near the crash site and the squad disembarked. The squad's Sargent wandered too far away from his men and was surrounded and gunned down. A pitched firefight near the front of the crashed UFO did not go in my men's favor, and I was down to the last of my X-Com operatives, Spencer MacNeil, a rookie trooper. "To hell with it!" I exclaimed, and sent Spencer into the breach. He single-handledly enter an alien UFO and kill 3 alien Snakemen in one turn with a grenade and a pistol shot. Those bastard snakemen tried to shoot back, but the fury of Spencer MacNeil (henceforth known as Spencer MacNeil, The Killing Machine) knew no bounds and he slew them all. Then he rode up an alien elevator to the second floor of the UFO to REALLY get his kill on and assassinate the Snakemen's cowardly leader. And as he rode up the elevator, one of those bastard Snakemen threw a grenade at his feet, which exploded! The evil hiss of the alien Snakemen turned to sibilant terror when, from the smoke and blast of the grenade, emerged Spencer MacNeil, The Killing Machine, who proceeded to gun down 2 more fools before picking up the aliens' own weapon and shooting the crap out of their leader with it! The mission ended one turn before Spencer MacNeil, The Killing Machine, would have collapsed from his wounds. This happened over 15 years ago in X-Com and I still remember it fondly. It has amazing twists and turns and real edge-of-the-seat stuff, like a good movie. And you know what? This is precisely the kind of narrative that you get all the time in Earth Reborn: hair-raising firefights, seat-of-the-pants escapes, and "so crazy it might work" planning that actually works...or at least fails entertainingly. You have all kinds of awesome stuff like a character being totally over-matched by an opponent, running to the armory, getting a bazooka, and then chasing their would-be bully around the board. Unlike Arkham Horror, the narrative emerges organically from the game's rule system rather than being bolted on by cards and systems specifically design to produce narrative results, which makes it all the more impressive. It is for this reason that I award Earth Reborn the Daveboy Award for Best Post-Game Storytime.

So, to sum it up, Earth Reborn supports an amazing, thematic narrative that I haven't seen in any other boardgame.

The Paragraph That You Can Skip To, Also Known as The Summary

I really hope that everyone will give Earth Reborn a try, even people who own a game similar to it (such as Space Hulk or Claustrophobia). This is an absolutely amazing game that feels like it fell through a portal from an alternate 1993, where the best skirmish boardgame ever made was published. The rules are elegant, the components high-quality, and the theme is sublimely ridiculous. I whole-heartedly recommend that you at least download the rulebook and check this bad boy out.

As always, thanks for reading.

Mansions of Madness -or- Mansion Attack! A Rocket-Powered Haunted-House Experience

Hooo-boy. Look at that title. You must think this review's going to be a real gusher. I'm going to sit here and tell you all about how great Mansions of Madness, the new Cthulu game from Fantasy Flight, is, and how I loved Arkham Horror and now there's a more thematic version of it, how it's all the fun of a Call of Cthulu campaign packed into half an evening.

NOPE.

Don't get me wrong, this IS a rocket-powered haunted-house experience. It's fast, it's streamlined -- BUT it also moves forward quickly, is always racing toward the finish in the straightest, most direct way possible. It is not subtle in any way, shape, or form. Being rocket-powered, in other words, is a mixed-blessing.

As with all my reviews, this is somewhat stream-of-consciousness, and I assume that you are somewhat familiar with the play mechanics and contents of the game. If you don't - there are many excellent reviews on the BoardGameGeek that discuss this, and I am not going to do a better job than those guys.

Let's begin.

Mansion Dung

I'll start by talking about the central problem with this game: The fact that it takes Descent-style play mechanics and repurposes them into the wrong genre, and how this decision destroys the pacing of the game.

Now, I'm going to stop for a moment and say that I love vanilla Descent. Descent is a great game that accomplishes exactly what it's going for. It's frantic, it's play mechanics keep it moving forward, and it successfully captures the thrilling feeling of a band of heroes pushing back against a powerful outer force. So, mechanically and on the surface, this seems like a good fit for a haunted house game - instead of the fantasy hero pushing back against the cruel Overlord, we have the brave investigator pushing back against the powerful outer force of the haunted mansion. The problem is with pacing. In Descent, the players hit the ground running. They kick open the door to the dungeon ready to bust some Beastman and smash some Skeleton. But this doesn't work in a haunted house game. Haunted house games should replicate their source material - haunted house fiction.

In haunted house fiction, there is always a creepy calm before the storm. It meanders a little bit. The characters don't start knowing that they are threatened. In the haunted house genre, the protagonists show up to the haunted house and a) don't believe or know it's haunted, or b) DO believe it's haunted, but can't find any evidence or are not equipped to properly deal with it once they do find it. Over the course of a haunted house narrative, strange things become apparent. The supernatural tomfoolery gradually escalates until the remaining beleaguered protagonist(s) Must Escape This F'ing House Alive.

Mansions of Madness throws these important genre tropes right out the window. The protagonists show up and, in both a meta-game and mechanical fashion, know immediately that they are in a Bad Place and that bad things are going to go down. The mechanics reinforce this. The Keeper starts gaining threat from the word go and can unload all sorts of nasties on the investigators, and it only gets worse. Escalation is definitely part of horror, but Mansions of Madness feels like it ramps up too quickly or from too many directions. After a couple of games, players acted less like Investigators and more like a SWAT team, kicking down the door and sweeping through the house with grim determination, ignoring anything but getting through the clue-chain. In other words, they started acting like the heroes from Descent.

(As an aside, Betrayal at House on the Hill has played out for me as a game with, more often than not, a short and disappointing anti-climactic finish from way too much randomness, but at least they got the pacing right.)

I am not happy with how this game is paced and how the scenarios play out. It occurs to me that there's a movie that plays very similar to how Mansions of Madness goes down; where the protagonists already know that the house is haunted and show up to kick some ass. That movie is called GhostBusters. And, I'm sorry to say, with the current mechanics in place, Mansions of Madness fails as a haunted house game. Let me draw an important distinction here: it doesn't fail AS A GAME, and is still fun, as long as you think of the game as The Real GhostBusters of The 20s: Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good.

Mansion Run

You know what else suffers from this rapid pacing? The game's story. There's an afterward in the game's rulebook that stays how part of horror is a connection to the characters and the telling of a story, and that the designer (Corey Konieczka) was trying to make a more story-driven horror game. Corey, I love you baby, you've done great work, I am really looking forward to Blood Bowl Team Manager, but you absolutely failed on this one.

The narratives of Mansions of Madness are a house of cards. Literally, that's not a joke - the story is cards. Parts of the story are written on tiny cards (split between the clues and the events) that you read through as the scenario progresses, and there simply isn't enough text to make you care. Have you ever done a "campfire story"? You know, where everyone sits around the campfire, person 1 starts the story and says a few sentences, then passes to person 2, who tries to continue the story in a few sentences, then passes to person 3, etc. etc? If you've ever done this, you know that the end result is a disjointed, bizarre narrative that doesn't flow properly and is only tenuously connected to person 1's original premise. This is the exact sort of story you get with these scenarios. One adventure even ends with a sudden "Rocks fall, everybody dies." (and no, I am not making that up).

The problem is that there's simply not enough time and not enough text to make the premise work. If the Investigators want to win, they have to race around and pick up the clues as fast as they can...who cares about that story at the beginning? The cards themselves are no help: event cards have to be general enough to work with all scenarios, and suffer greatly for it. And, lastly, the Keeper is expressly forbidden by the rules from looking at the event cards, so they don't have a way to create an overarching narrative to tie everything together. The whole thing plays out as a farce. Here's a thought: this board game takes you to Disneyland, leads you into the Haunted Mansion, shoves you into the TombMobile, triples the speed of the ride, and then asks you to "enjoy the story". Not going to happen.

Mansion Fun

Well now that I've taken a dump on the story and the pacing, what's left? Only the rest of the game, which is pretty darn awesome. The combat system works well, the turns play fast and are streamlined but still present interesting options, the minis are great, blah blah blah yakkity smackity. You know all this from the other reviews. So I'm going to focus on the game's best feature: the modularity of its scenario design. The game's scenario-bsed paradigm is brilliant for the way that it could easily fix any problem with the game, because - as many astute reviewers have pointed out - the game system in the box is far, far larger than the included scenarios. If you've played Dominion you know what I am talking about - how different each game of Dominion can be with different "seed cards" from different expansions. Mansions of Madness has a very similar principle. This is a totally modular system that could support a ton of different play types, and I am greatly impressed by it.

Let's look at the included scenarios with Mansions of Madness for an excellent illustration of this point:

One scenario has a lot of "player screwage" - players trying to kill other players, including one player that might switch sides during the game
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tough, regenerating opponent that you have to manage, rather than fight directly
One scenario has a little combat, but a lot of environmental hazards that you have to take into consideration
One scenario just stinks and the less said the better (Classroom Curses, if you're curious - please do not play this scenario!)
One scenario has a lot of combat against a tide of weak opponents that can turn deadly if you let them cluster (as an aside, this is probably the strongest scenario, as the game's rapid pacing and mechanics fits very well with the scenario's narrative)

There is a marked difference between game #1 and game #5. The Investigators have different priorities, different builds. Oh, sure, there are similarities: the Investigators still rocket down the clue-trail and the story is a disconnected mess. But the individual game turns of the two scenarios feel very different from each other. In one, the Investigators are concerned with positioning, area control, and offense. In the other, they are suspicious of each other and the threat is much more internal. They really do play out like different games.

Man, I just can't say enough good things about the scenario system that Mansions of Madness uses. It's so flexible and modular, you can basically do anything with it. Let me give you an example of how you can easily fix my pacing problems and story problems that I've noted earlier, using nothing but a small tweak to out-of-the-box mechanics and some cards:

To fix the pacing problems, you just implement a simple rule built into the scenario: until the first event card is resolved OR the first clue is resolved, the Keeper doesn't gain any threat. This means that the Investigators can take a little time and scope out the mansion at the beginning. However, certain exploration cards might grant the Keeper threat or global advantages, so exploring the mansion willy nilly will cost the investigators. Since it's dull for the Keeper to sit and watch the Investigators without doing much, you might do something like allow the Keeper to draw and potentially play one Mythos card per turn, to allow him to mess with the Investigators without going into full-blown Keeper Attack mode.

To fix the problems with the disjointed narrative, each scenario simply needs many more event cards (instead of the ubiquitous five event cards for each scenario, there could be twenty...with much shorter time counters between them, so that the overall game length is only slightly increased.) The majority of these cards do not have to do anything except advance the story. Most of them would just have flavor text and detail the spooky goings on in the mansion, or to foreshadow later event cards. This would help to beef up the narrative thread. Instead of having guys suddenly pop out of closets or monsters just show up out of nowhere, the cards would set up these events and make each scenario more coherent. You can even make "major events" and "minor events" to separate the story events from the mechanical events.

As you can see, just a few simple changes would fix all of my major problems. That's how great the scenario system is - you can subvert or tweak the mechanics very easily to get the effect you want.

Mansion Done

More than any other board game I've ever played, the first expansion of Mansions of Madness is going to make or break it. If the expansion contains more incoherent mansion rocket-rides, with the Investigators tearing around the clue-trail to the exclusion of everything else, this game will become nothing more than Spookhouse Descent. If it contains well-paced scare scenarios with a strong narrative and different, plot-related mechanics and player choices, it will break out and establish itself as the premiere narrative board game. But all of the extra minis, combat cards, equipment, and new tiles won't matter if the game can't get the fundamentals right. Careful scenario design is critical to this game's success.

That's not to say that Mansions of Madness won't be a successful game, even if the expansion is just more of the same. Some people would really like Descent's mechanics but hate the dungeon theme; those people will enjoy Mansions of Madness. And the hard-core Lovecraftians will enjoy seeing the Shuggoths and Cthonians in the game, even if the tone is more like "GhostBusters" than "The Unnamable". But for those of us looking for a thematic horror experience in board game form - and I think there are a great, great many of us, judging from the reviews and posts on the internet - we'll have to keep waiting.

Thunderspire Labyrinth Review of a Review That Annoyed Me

More like "Thud"erspire Labyrinth. That "thud" sound you hear is the boring tactical encounters of this module hitting the floor like a sack of dwarven hammers forged from potatoes. It's the sound of the module's numerous great ideas going absolutely nowhere. In short, Thunderspire is a friggin' dud of an adventure, and the savvy DM will rip the guts out of this module, dumping the awful structure but keeping the great settings and ideas.

This module has, and I am not friggin' joking here, one of the best hooks I have ever read. The ancient minotaur city of...wait a minute, what am I doing? You already know the plot of the module, you've got the internet. Google Thunderspire Labyrinth if you need the gritty details. What you need to know is that the end result of all that minotaur nonsense is basically Mos Eisley Spaceport in the middle of a maze. Is that not awesome? Duergar rub shoulders with Drow and Ogres. Kobolds slink in the shadows, and anything can be had for a price. Are you not getting worked up about this? Are you not seeing the possibilities? It's an early introduction to the Underdark, it's a black market, it's a bunch of ammoral NPCs giving the players reasons to go down into the cool-as-heck minotaur maze and fight Ioun-knows-what in Vecna-knows-where. In short, it's a huge nexus of excellent adventure hooks. And they really are GOOD hooks. Yet without fail almost every single one that the designers touched turned into vanilla pudding. And it's not even good vanilla pudding. It's the kind you could make yourself, if you were in a hurry.

One of the reasons I wrote this review is due to that OTHER guy's review of Thunderspire Labyrinth on RPG.NET. He absolutely raves about it. Go and read it now: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13899.phtml. "You are not going to believe this crazy stuff!" is the general vibe of the review. Well let me tell you something right now: you are going to believe this crazy stuff. It's very believable. Most of it is a bog-standard, linear adventure through a slaver's lair, duergar keep, and abandoned tower. This is not cutting edge stuff here, folks.

Sorry to harp on that other review, but I spent over 20 bucks 'cause of it and I want to play the module that guy was talking about. I really do. The sad fact is the stuff in That Other Review doesn't happen unless the DM is not running the adventure as written. For example, the big line that jumps out at me is when the review says, "The slavers would be disgusted at the sick crap the gnolls are doing." Well as written, the party will have literally wiped the slavers out on their initial foray into the Labyrinth. Then they will decap the duegar, and only then will they meet the gnolls. So there's nobody to be disgusted at the gnolls, because the party murdered them. Except for maybe the party, because hey -- gnolls are disgusting.

There's other stuff like that through the review, too. Like this choice cut: "the party will be competing with TWO groups of adventurers, only one of which is alive!" No way! I gotta tell you that sounds friggin' awesome! Too bad it's complete crap. One "group" of adventurers are two dudes who sit in a room until the party kicks down the door and confronts them, then they try to trick the party and stab them in the back. The other group is a wight and his zombie buddies who wander the Labyrinth looking for treasure and don't give a hoot about the party (in fact, the wight will bail if the party start whipping his butt, and plead for his unlife if captured). So again, it's horse-puckey, unless you take these two concepts and extensively modify them yourself.

Now admittedly you can take all of the elements in this adventure and start chopping them up and creatively re-arrange them. For example, you could say that the plain ole' duergar fortress in the adventure isn't so plain anymore -- it sits on a major passage to the Underdark and they are controlling the slave trade. Now the fortress is under attack by Drow, and while they fight 'em off the party has to infiltrate the fortress through a secret entrance that they bought off a shifty kobold. And maybe some of the slavers from the other encounter are there negotiating with the duegar. Not very good, I know, but it's something a little different, something that uses the setting of Thunderspire in the adventure. You aren't going to find a lot of duergar fortresses under assault by Drow for slave trade rights in most campaigns. However that's not what Thunderspire Labyrinth gives you, as written. What it gives you is a bunch of demon dwarves in a keep that you fight through room-by-room. Boooooooring. That keep could be anywhere, in any adventure. It's something that *I* could have come up with myself without any help...and folks, I'm an idiot. Any adventure idea that I could have written myself is not worth paying for.

Now you might be saying, "Jeez dude, quit harping on the dang RPG.net review guy. Every DM adds and subtracts something from published adventures. Hardly anybody runs them exactly as they are." I know dude. I know. But there's a difference between little things like changing your NPCs around and moving the town a bit and maybe adding a small subplot your players care about, versus huge stuff like gutting encounters, changing the plot, and smashing together different concepts from the same module. If I have to take the floorplan that the module gives me and plug new encounters into it because the designers stunk it up then that's it. We're done, game over.

Also I want to take this opportunity to whine a little bit. Thanks Wizards of the Coast for putting 1(!) poster map sheet into my 25 dollar adventure, which gives you three locations total. Great work. They weren't even nice enough to put the final battle map on there! To put a cherry on this poo sundae, I can't even go to DnDInsider.com and download high-res mastersheets for the other 90 percent of the encounters that they didn't include on the poster map. So I'm stuck with the dumb little postage-stamp sized pictures with little markers showing me where to set up the monsters that come in the encounter booklet. Here's a hint for whoever is making these modules: take every encounter in any of your books and make sure they can be downloaded and printed at 1" = 5' scale with no loss of detail and no markers on them. Could you do that for me, please? Because this whole pre-generated thing is kind of useless if I end up using my dumb dungeon tiles with dry-erase beds, pits, and walls written on them for pre-generated areas, thus looking like something I pulled out of my butt at the last minute. I want to make my battle mat look nice. Is that so wrong?

Now I want to end on a positive note here. So let me say this good stuff about That Other Review and about the adventure proper: Thunderspire Labyrinth does have one of the best encounters in a 4th edition module ever. Yes, the other review is right: the Proving Ground friggin' rules super-hard. Good job there, Thunderspire Labyrinth. But you're not off the hook. There's still a small matter of all that other dull stuff you tossed at us. And for that, we're taking you down. To Chinatown.

Road to Legend Review

There are plenty of exhaustive reviews in here for Road to Legend (RtL) out there and I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, so if you want a detailed game flow synopsis or rules breakdown you won't find them here. I want to talk about why Road to Legend doesn't work for me personally. I still enjoy Vanilla Descent a ton and will keep playing it, but I don't know if I'll ever tough out a Road to Legend campaign again.

I want to point out that this is a very subjective review, is very personal, and is somewhat stream of consciousness. If that bothers you, turn back now!

Playing Through Jello

One of my biggest problems with RtL is how friggin' long everything takes. I don't mean the actual dungeon levels, I mean any kind of "campaign strategy". These are things like which city to sack as Overlord, when to visit a Secret Master as the heroes, or whatever. Things that don't involve directly slaying stuff and grabbing loot in the dungeons. And that's a problem, because each dungeon takes approximately six hours to play out...and that constitutes a single game turn. Sacking a city can take around 4 turns, which means that your Overlord may plan to sack a solitary city and then see it fall 18 gameplay hours later. But if the Overlord's plans are thwarted at the 12 hour mark? Well he'll be off to burn another city...hope that works out for him. You'll know after another 20+ hours of dungeon crawling.

And believe me, the "campaign strategy" matters a lot in this game. It determines which skills the heroes get and how close the Overlord is to winning the game before the Final Confrontation. You had better pay attention to what happens on the Overworld map as it slowly...slowly...slowly unfolds between dungeon crawls.

I hated this. It felt like I was playing the game through jello, where I would make a decision and only see it reflected in the game one month and 200 shattered skeletons later. For better or for worse, a real-life month may go by before the Overlord plans and then actually sees GrayHaven fall. Vanilla Descent is a relatively fast-paced tactical game. Road to Legend keeps that aspect of the game but slathers a slow-paced strategy game on top of it, and it ultimately taints everything.

The See-Saw Effect

In a game as big as ambitious as Road to Legend there are going to be imbalances, and that's ok. There are quests in Vanilla Descent that are imbalanced and they still manage to be fun. Heck, I've played a dozen games of Fantasy Flight's very own Battlestar Galactica game and lost the majority of them, but still had a great time and would play again in a heartbeat. So a game doesn't have to be balanced to be fun. But it should be fair, or at least feel fair. RtL almost never does.

Throughout the campaign, the heroes and Overlord were put in situations where victory was nearly impossible. Each side would pull out a card that basically would say "you/your opponent is screwed." In one instance the heroes would lay waste to everything on the dungeon level. In the next, the Overlord would pound them into jelly. Folks, it's simply not fun to play a game with two modes: "make the best of a bad situation" or "domination". It was a rare occurrence when both sides felt they had a chance at winning. There were a few surprises but for the most part the game constantly felt stacked against one side or another. So, even though the amount of Conquest points kept the same ratio throughout the campaign (and thus was, in some way, "balanced") the entire time felt either like a horrible trouncing or a supreme victory. There were rarely any nail-biters, something I've found Vanilla Descent to generate quite a lot.

The other problem I have with the game is that everyone knows which skills are insanely good and which ones are trash, and so the "campaign strategy" is, by-and-large, a race by the heroes to get those awesome skills before the Overlord trashes the towns that they are located in. You know exactly what you are going to see for each Hero: Knight, SpiritWalker, Leadership, etc. So a lot of the game is: are the heroes going to end up with overpowered skill combinations that they use round-after-round, thus negating the tactical elements of Descent? Or will the Overlord sack the city and prevent this? Tune in in 23 game-hours to find out!

The Locked-In Adversary

In Vanilla Descent the Overlord is the guy you love to hate, the Blofield oaf of the subterranean set, the mastermind who keeps things more interesting than some brain-dead paper-AI system. In Road to Legend the Overlord ends up battered, bruised, and burnt-out from constantly trying to go braino-y-braino against 4 other players.

It's simply too much to ask a well-adjusted player to sit across the table from his friends and, week after week, devote the entire space of his mental faculties to beating them. Wait, not just beating them...but utterly crushing them. Annihilating them. You can't ever let up as the Overlord, you can't hold back; because of the see-saw nature of RtL, where you never know when your next victory opportunity is going to be. You have Gold Beasts, the players just pulled a level with a Dragon in it, and it's time to bring the pain...over and over and over again, because the next level may have Humanoids and your Ogres are still pathetic Copper weasels, so it's gonna be a cakewalk for the heroes if that happens. And so you smash them, crush them, burn them to death, stall them, whatever it takes. And once they pull the next level dungeon and it's more Beasts, you feel elated. Let the good times roll! Until they pull a boss you haven't upgraded and one-shot him on the second turn.

The fact that Road to Legend takes so damn long to play out and tends to be so one-sided is why the Overlord is such an awful role in this game. At the beginning Copper level of the campaign he's a god, by Gold level he's Gollum. And unlike the Hero players, who can switch around their Heroes relatively easily, the Overlord cannot switch his role to another player (can you imagine? "Ok Tim, you're the Overlord now, here's my strategy for tossing the Sun Gem into eternal Darkness, good luck. I'm just gonna play Steelhorns for you 'till you're sick of it.") In Vanilla Descent, you're the Overlord for a while, you win or lose, you switch roles or do something else. In Road to Legend, you are in Overlord Jail, you're going to be there FOREVER. At the very least your friends are going to grow annoyed with you, and sometimes will get outright hostile. And eventually you can't hide behind "It's what I am supposed to do!" It just gets old.

I also want to point out that I don't care how smart you are, matching wits with 4 other players of similar skill is going to be hard. They will catch mistakes that you won't. So the game mechanics conspire to make the Overlord feel isolated and besieged by the other players. It's like a sick sociology experiment. Somebody needs to write a thesis: "The Overlord: Isolation and Madness in a Fantasy World". Anyone who actually does write that: you owe me a buck for the idea.

What This All Means Together

Now you might be saying, "Now David, you have completely gone off the rails here. In Vanilla Descent, there's an Overlord, and no one feels that way." Well in Vanilla Descent this is not so much a problem due primarily to game length. Once the game session is over, you can switch roles, talk about what just happened, etc. RtL isn't over until months have passed. There's a pall over the table after every session. Nobody knows if the ass-whooping they just got is going to keep being felt a month down the road. Nobody knows if the huge successes are going to continue. And the Overlord just has plain old nobody, and no prospects of anybody on their side.

Because Road to Legend is so friggin' long and time-intensive it starts to get a sort of oppressive momentum. At first you're just laughing about it and having fun. After you have sunk 30 hours into a campaign you start wanting to get a payoff. After 50, you're emotionally invested.

And when you take the see-saw imbalances you just never know when a small issue is going to multiply into a big issue -- if taking Born to the Bow instead of some other skill is going to end up costing you 30 hours from now. Everyone is constantly on edge, scrabbling for a small advantage, firing on all cylinders to beat their adversary. And that's fine in Vanilla Descent, where after 6 hours and 100 dead Beastman you put away the dice and congratulate your opponent for going 100 percent the entire time and close the book on that adventure. Then somebody else says they'll be the Overlord and the current one says, "Good luck with those crappy Hell Hounds, then." That intensity just doesn't work in Road to Legend.

Is there anyone out there who wants to run a marathon as a series of 100 meter dashes? That's how playing Road to Legend felt to me.