A copy of A Gentle Rain was provided by Incredible Dream for the review purposes
“Always changing, yet always itself” is the message from the game to the player on the front of the rule leaflet. Themed as a tranquil retreat to a quiet lake that will centre your mind, everything about A Gentle Rain is trying to be a calm, meditative experience.
The rule leaflet sets the scene. You have come to the lakeside hoping to see a rare and beautiful sight. The lilies of the lake only open their blossoms in the rain, and only rarely do all eight varieties bloom at once. The goal of the game, bloom those blossoms.
There are 6 steps to learning the game, with the first step being “get comfortable”. Make some tea, change into cozy pants. Put on some calming music and take a moment to centre yourself. A game of A Gentle Rain starts with a single tile placed onto the table, then your action is to just draw a tile, and place it adjacent to an existing one, matching flowers. These tiles have the corners taken out of them, and when you manage to get a perfect square, you place one of the eight wooden lily discs into the newly created circle at the corner of 4 tiles. If you manage to get all eight lily discs out before the stack of tiles runs out, you’ve succeeded. If not, well, that’s fine too. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
A Gentle Rain is a svelte package. A box no bigger than my palm, although deep. 28 luxuriously thick tiles, eight wooden discs with colourful printing, are all that this game contains. There is functionally no barrier to entry for A Gentle Rain, it’s open the box, flip over a tile and start. Literally nothing is stopping you from playing this game at nearly any opportunity.
The rule book suggests taking a moment to relax before engaging with the experience. Remove any stressors, preform a calming, centring exercise, create a peaceful environment, then begin. The randomness of the tile stack means that you can’t really strategize, not effectively anyway, and that’s part of the point of A Gentle Rain. You aren’t here to focus and fixate on winning or surmounting this challenge. This game wants you to relax. Don’t take the world so seriously. Sip your tea, listen to your body, and flip a tile. Maybe that tile will work and maybe it won’t. Be mindful, be present, and be centred.
One of the tips that I’ve used in my parenting is that when your child is having a meltdown, or a tantrum, or some other kind of emotional outburst, their brains a locked in a highly emotional state. Emotional in this case means unconscious and irrational. Something that can help pull their brains out of that state is to engage the logic processors in their mind. Something like “Can you count the stars on the wall?” “Hey, you have paint on your toes! What colour are your toes?”, prompts like that. This brings the logic side of the brain online and helps kids come back to a more centred position (For more information, check out The Whole Brained Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson).
The gameplay of A Gentle Rain, while as simple as can be, the act of matching colours and looking for the perfect spot for each of your tiles is enough logic to pull your brain away from being in an emotional state. There’s just enough to look at, enough locations to consider before making your decision to engage the logic processors in your brain, which pulls your mind into a centred state, and not too much logic that you fall into a cold, calculating state. The other day, after a long day of parenting and a more difficult than usual bedtime, I felt myself fuming. I plopped myself down at my table, grabbed A Gentle Rain that was nearby, and started playing. By the time the 8th lily bloomed, my stress had seeped out, my brain felt calm, and I was ready to enjoy the rest of my evening.
I’m not saying that A Gentle Rain is a surefire stress breaker, but it is an exercise in centring yourself. I think A Gentle Rain is a catalyst; a reminder to take a moment and breathe. Rest your mind, play a little game, and face your day as a happier person. I feel like A Gentle Rain would be the perfect game to live beside your breakfast table. Playing a game in the early morning hours with a steaming coffee sounds like a lovely routine to be in, and a perfect way to start the day right.
A few games have tried to capture the feeling of a roguelike video game, and in my opinion, no game does it better than One Deck Dungeon by Chris Cieslik, published by Asmadi Games.
In One Deck Dungeon, one or two heroes take on a dungeon, guarded by numerous traps and monsters. Each challenge requires the heroes to achieve certain dice values in 3 aspects, strength, agility, and magic in order to overcome the challenge unscathed. Players take damage to their health, and/or lose time by discarding cards off the top of the deck. After each encounter, the heroes can choose to either increase their dice pool, learn a new skill, or take the experience to hopefully level up. Higher levels offer more wild dice, as well as potions, and increases the heroes skill and dice pool limits.
Once the deck is out of cards, the floor is over. The deck is reshuffled, and players continue on their dungeon delve. After the 3rd floor, the boss encounter happens, which players attack round after round until either the players take too many hits and perish, or the boss succumbs to the might of the attacking heroes.
One Deck Dungeon includes 5 characters, all with different starting dice pools and abilities, and 5 bosses, each with a different modifier that needs to be dealt with on each of the 3 floors of the dungeon. Multiple expansions exist for One Deck Dungeon, but I’m only going to focus on the base game here.
As you might expect from a roguelike dice chucker, there’s a lot of luck in One Deck Dungeon. From the values you roll, to the order the encounters come out in, there are a lot of aspects outside your control that can make or break your run, but that’s part of the fun in Roguelikes, right? One Deck Dungeon does give players tools to manipulate their fate, such as trading in a blue 4 to get a yellow and red 4 in return, plus a single +1 modifier that can be used on any dice, or that players can always trade in any two dice to get a single wild dice of the lower value.
One Deck Dungeon absorbs me in its dice manipulation puzzle. I love the moment of rolling 8 or 9 dice, letting them settle, then slowly massaging the numbers to overcome the challenge. It can be really annoying if you modify 4 or 5 dice, then realize you made a critical blunder and need to roll back your changes. But that’s more a comment on my own lack of mental power and making changes before really assessing my tableau than a nitpick about the game.
I’ve had at least half a dozen runs that have just been utter failures. From getting to the boss, only to get utterly pantsed, to falling flat and rolling a staggering number of 1’s against a monster and being forced to take 7 damage in a single encounter. While these moments feel unlucky, I don’t think that One Deck Dungeon suffers from being ‘too lucky’. A big part of the game is knowing when to take a hit, and when to take a challenge reward as experience vs the skill vs the dice.
Even with just the base game, One Deck Dungeon feels like it has a great amount of replayability. Each run through a floor, a player will only see 8 – 10 encounters, and each encounter has their own quirks. Add that to the uniqueness of the characters and the bosses, you can play a lot of One Deck Dungeon before you exhaust its variety.
The campaign mode has a variety of difficulties too, with the goal of the campaign to take a single character and best all the bosses in as few plays as possible. The more dungeons you run through, the more skills and benefits you unlock, making your character a veritable powerhouse by the end of the campaign with all kinds of benefits that can be difficult to remember to use. This does mean that the first few games of a campaign will be the most difficult, which is unsatisfying, but once you’re over the hump, it ends up being a pretty fun challenge.
What I really appreciate about One Deck Dungeon is the small footprint. It’s a tiny box dungeon crawl that feels as satisfying as most of the other dice chucking dungeon crawl games that take up way more space. I also very much appreciate that all the characters are female, which is very non-typical for this genre.
One Deck Dungeon has 2 expansions released, with a 3rd one in crowdfunding at the time of this writing. Each expansion is stand-alone, meaning you can play it as its own little thing, or create a hybrid deck by mixing in the original. More variety is only a good thing when it comes to One Deck Dungeon.
If you’re looking for a roguelike board game, One Deck Dungeon can’t be beat. If a fast and compact dice manipulation adventure that is quite challenging to overcome sounds like your cup of tea, I highly suggest you check out One Deck Dungeon. The experience is mildly addicting, especially after you manage to overcome your first boss, then swapping characters will keep you busy for hours on end!
Apparently I have a love hate relationship with dexterity games. It’s a love, because I adore games like Crokinole and Tokyo Highway. Flicking and building rickety structures makes me giddy and excited. But then I also harbour this utter hatred for Jenga. You’d think I’d enjoy that one too, as it’s kind of the quintessential stacking game. I don’t really know what it is, but I don’t like playing Jenga.
Tinderblox, by Rob Sparks is a dexterity game in a small package. Literally, a mint tin holds the entire contents of this game, Which is just some red and yellow cubes, brown sticks, a small deck of cards, and a pair of painfully ineffectual tweezers.
A game of Tinderblox begins with a single campfire card, and 3 brown sticks. Then, on your turn, you draw a card that tells you what you need to add to the fire. You take the tweezers, pluck the pieces out of the tin, arrange them, then place them onto the campfire. If you knock things down, you lose! Sometimes the cards will tell you to use your non-dominant hand, but that’s the extent of the craziness.
Tinderblox is kind of refreshing as a dexterity game. Its miniscule size means you won’t have a deafening crash when something goes wrong, unlike Jenga. It’s easy to transport and play anywhere, unlike Tokyo Highway or Crokinole. In fact, it’s so easy to play anywhere, that I plopped it on the counter while making Christmas dinner at my in-law’s place, and my sister-in-law and I just took our turns in between our chopping and cooking.
The variety in Tinderblox doesn’t come from the game necessarily, but from your fellow players. If you happen to play with someone who takes risks and places their pieces in precarious locations, that game will feel a lot more tense than if your opponent is super conservative and always takes the safe pick.
The tweezers that come in the game are awful, but I postulate that their ineffectuall-ness is really part of the game. Also, the cubes are wider than the logs, which means you can’t just pinch a stack from above. A fair amount of the challenge in Tinderblox is struggling against the physical limitations of those damn tweezers. I know some people have house-ruled that tweezers are optional, or have replaced them with a more functional set, but I’m of the mind that they’re supposed to be bad. Tinderblox is pushing you to fail. That said, you can become skilled at Tinderblox, as my wife has. She and my sister-in-law managed to run the deck out between the two of them, resulting in a grotesque spire of logs and cubes that was an awe to behold.
Tinderblox doesn’t push the envelope on what a dexterity game can do. It’s not a huge physical gimmick that you need to ensure your table is level for. It’s a fun little game to plop on the table during any social event. I recently brought it on vacation with me, and it’s been a hit everywhere I pulled it out. On a friends’ coffee table after dinner, on the pub table, surrounded by drinks, and even as the cap of a longer game night.
Equal Rites, by Sir Terry Pratchett was his 3rd Discworld novel, originally published in 1986 and tells the story of young Eskarina as she inherits magic from a dying wizard, and grows up with the innate ability to use magic, despite being a woman.
The story kicks off with a dark and stormy night. A baby is being born, and an old wizard knocks on the door of the blacksmith. The blacksmith’s wife is the one having a baby, and the old wizard explains that he is going to die soon, and must pass on his power. Seeing as how the Blacksmith is the 8th son, and the baby being born is his 8th child, it is the most auspicious event. The blacksmith calls for the newly born babe, and from the bundle of cloths the midwife presents him with, a tiny hand rests on the Wizard’s staff. Boom, the transfer is complete.
“You duddering fool, it’s a girl!” The midwife exclaims. The old Wizard dies, and leaves the inconveniences of his actions to the living. The girl, Eskarina Smith, grows up with none of this knowledge, but as she grows, the magic inside of her is leaking at the seams, trying to break out. One day she turns one of her brothers into a pig, and the midwife (who is also the local witch), takes her under her wing to teach her the ways of witching, hoping that becoming a witch will be good enough to tame the magic inside of her, but even this is not enough. Granny Weatherwax writes letters to the Unseeing University on behalf of Esk, imploring them to take on this girl, despite how unorthodox it would be to have a female wizard.
After no replies, and more magical mishaps from Esk, Granny Weatherwax chooses to take Esk to the University herself before Esk accidentally flattens the village. On their travels, Esk encounters a number of challenges that she overcomes with ignorance of the way the world ‘should’ work, and an innate ability to use magic at the most opportune times.
Upon arrival at the University, Esk and Granny Weatherwax are laughed out of the room. “There’s never been a female wizard before! It’s against the Law!”. Granny and Esk take on servant jobs, to remain in the University, hoping that the doddering old fools leading the University will see Esk’s magic, and reconsider their position.
Eventually, things go haywire, Esk saves the day, Granny Weathereax and the Archchancellor Cutangle spend a bit of time together where they both grain appreciation for the others’ profession.
What I found incredible, is that Terry Pratchett can write a book in 1986, and thirty years later, the commentary still rings true. I wish I could be more jaded and say things like gender discrimination are a thing of the past, but alas, our world is still filled with chauvinistic and misogynistic tendencies.
The chauvinism in Equal Rites isn’t brute-ish or really even that masculine. There’s a sense of airy-ness to the whole situation. “We can’t have a woman Wizard because it’s never been done before” “There’s simply no precedent!”. It feels simple, and at the end of the day, it is simple. They change the law, and Esk becomes a wizard with no fuss.
Equal Rites was utterly entertaining, but not challenging. I love Terry Pratchett’s writing, and his use of simile and metaphor is utterly marvellous. “She had so many bangles that the slightest movement sounded like a percussion section falling off a cliff”. Then a bit later, when the character shifts slightly, “The drummer who had climbed halfway back up the cliff fell onto the toiling cymbalists”. Several lines in Equal Rites had my wife and I both laughing out loud. But at no point did I feel like Equal Rites was anything more than a funny, easy to read book. Yes, the commentary that the men in power were doddering old fools is poignant, but it wraps up rather easily in the end.
As an entry-point into the Discworld series, I think Equal Rites is a perfectly fine option. Ankh-Morpork is barely featured here, unlike the in The Colour of Magic and Guards, Guards!!, which are two often suggested entry points that feature the city quite heavily. But my opinion in this situation shouldn’t matter too heavily. I haven’t read every Terry Pratchett Novel, just… a dozen or so.
I never have a bad time with Discworld novels, and Equal Rites is no different. I felt a bit let down that there was no real main antagonist, which made the climax feel a bit ethereal to me. I don’t foresee myself coming back to Equal Rites any time soon, but I am looking forward to reading more of The Witches line of books.
Remember that time, when I was talking about the games I’ve played the most, but don’t own, and said that Magic Maze just wasn’t a game that I felt compelled to own, despite having played it nearly 3 dozen times? Well, Math Trades are wonderful things, and I’m now the proud owner of Magic Maze, so I’m ready to give it a proper review!
Magic Maze is a real time cooperative game for 1 to 8 players. The goal of Magic Maze is to guide the four characters, a dwarf, mage, ranger, and warrior, all represented by brightly coloured pawns, though a convoluted mall so they can steal an item and be prepared for their next adventure, then escape the mall, all before the time runs out.
What’s special about Magic Maze is that players don’t embody any one of those characters. Instead, each player’s role in this puzzle is moving any character in a specific direction, and/or activate a specific aspect of the mall. Like, one player can move anyone to the north, while another player can activate the escalators and move characters east, and another player is responsible for adding new tiles to the board when someone reaches the edge of the map. Players need to cooperatively use the direction they’re allowed to move the characters to navigate the narrow hallways to find the loot.
The rulebook for Magic Maze includes 17 scenarios that scaffold players into the full game. The first run includes only 9 of the 24 tiles, and teaches players the very basics of the game, which is just getting each character to their loot space. Every subsequent scenario adds a rule or a twist to make the experience harder and more complex, such as adding the exits, then special abilities for each character, and so on, until players need to navigate a mall that’s 20 tiles large.
There are two main hurdles to overcome. The first is that the game runs on a 2-and-a-half minute timer. There are ways to flip that timer, but those opportunities are limited. The second barrier to victory is that all communication is limited. So limited, as in, once the game starts, no one can talk at all. Don’t worry too much about that, as there is one reprieve. The “DO SOMETHING” pawn. An obnoxious red pawn that anyone at anytime can pick up and slam down in front of someone else, telling them that they should be doing something at that moment.
The sound of this big red pawn tapping the table has been burned into my psyche
If players are able to grab their loot and get out of the maze before the sand runs out, they win! If not, they bicker about who screwed up the heist while setting up for another run.
Listen, it’s no secret that I love real time games, and will hoist them upon anyone who doesn’t say no. I love the tension that having a tangible loss condition constantly ticking away, and the game mechanics trying desperately to pull your attention away from those timers so you forget about them and lose. I understand that not everyone shares my love of timers, but don’t listen to them. They’re wrong.
Magic Maze is quite simple to play, as you generally only have one or two things that you can do at all, depending on your player count. It’s not hard to remember that you can only move left. What’s more difficult is having people remember that they can’t fix their mistakes if they go a square too far, or locking down their communication to the level the game wants them to.
The first scenarios in the rule book are perfect for teaching new players the barest version of the game, and the scenario structure makes the game incredibly modular, so you can cater to various difficulty levels by adding and removing complexity as required. If you want things easier, the elf’s intercom module lets players talk whenever the elf is standing on an intercom space. If you want things harder, there are plenty of fun tricks for you to discover.
The reason Magic Maze made it into my “games I’ve played the most but don’t own” post was mostly due to the fact that a game can end after just 2.5 minutes. And, at maximum, take 15 minutes, if players are dilly-dallying and hitting all the timer flip stations. The second reason was because I played it with a couple different groups in quick succession at our local board game café, I always felt like I could just play it there and didn’t need to invest in my own copy.
Well, nowadays, I only visit the café twice a year. This is a by-product of moving much further away, and the fact that I now have my own substantial collection of games, not to mention that my buddies all have their own collection of games begging to be played, left a small gap in my heart. I’m not going to make the trip to the café to play Magic Maze anymore, but it’s still a really fun game that I’d love to break out now and then.
Because Magic Maze is so accessible, it’s real easy to suggest it with any group. This is a boon, but it can also make it really easy to over-play this game. After introducing it to 4 different groups within a couple of weeks, playing the first 6 scenarios over and over, it’s easy to get a bit burnt out on the system. And the scenario approach to learning the game is pretty important, as it introduces the most important concepts first, then adds the spice in later chapters. If you threw someone into the deep end, their head would spin in a flurry of iconography and the furious tapping of the ‘Do Something’ pawn.
Speaking of that obnoxious relic, I both love and hate the ‘Do Something’ pawn. On one hand, it’s loud and grating, having it tapped sharply every time someone picks it up and places it in front of someone else. On the other hand, the tension when both you’re the own trying to get someone to move a character, and when that pawn is placed in front of you, is simultaneously dreadful and delicious. What path you want to take is obvious to you, but is utterly hidden for someone else. When the pawn lands in front of you, and you’re frantically searching for anything you can or should be doing, all while the precious seconds are ticking away, goodness I live for this sort of fun.
My feelings are best summed up thusly. I recently went to a friend’s house to play Revive, a heavier economic action efficiency game. I brought along Magic Maze “just in case you actually wanted to have fun tonight.” and we did end up playing it at the end of the night, and all three grown adults playing the game collapsed into a fit of giggles as we failed the first mission 3 times in a row. Magic Maze is a fun game, one that puts a smile on your face, while also offering a challenge to overcome. It’s not the same kind of sophisticated fun that a game like Brass: Birmingham offers, but more of a slapstick juvenile type of fun that leaves you grinning from ear to ear, if not wholly satisfied. I don’t want my game night to consist only of Magic Maze, but I’m sure glad when it makes an appearance.
