I’m going to be honest with you, friends. I may be an adult, but inside I’m basically a big kid. My affection is easily won with trinkets and sweets. I do not have sophisticated tastes, rather, I yearn for simplicity. In my spare time, I just want to play with my toys.
Published by Queen Games way back in 2006, Shogun is set during Japan’s Sengoku period (1467-1573). Players assume the roles of a great Daimyo, leading their troops to conquer provinces across Japan. With an interesting twist of action programming and area control, playing the game is fairly straightforward. Each round begins with the 10 actions cards shuffled and placed along a row, indicating the order the actions will be taken. Only the first 5 are face up, however, giving players limited information on how the season will develop.
The actions players can take are things like spending money to build castles, temples, and theatres, or deploy more troops in the provinces they control, taxing the peasants for food or coin, and initiating combat with a neighbouring province. Combat in Shogun is determined with a cube tower with a couple slotted baffles shoved into the chute. All attackers and defenders are dropped into the cube tower, and whichever team emerges from the tower with the majority, takes control of the province. Any troops that get trapped in the tower might fall out at a later time for surprising reinforcements.
A round begins with the action cards getting placed in their spots, some face up, others face down. Then the 5 bonus cards get put into their slots, that will enhance your faction for a round, and serve as the player order queue for the rest of the round. Then simultaneously, players take all the province cards they have in their hands, and place them face down onto their action mat, indicating which action each province will take during that turn. Players also have a few bidding cards to bid for turn order, or, they can place those bidding cards on actions as a feint. They pass doing the action, but your opponents don’t know that.
After everyone’s programmed their actions, the bid for turn order resolves, an event gets revealed. There are 4 face up events at the start of each year, and each round, one of those events will be randomly selected to affect everyone for the entire round. Then, the core of the game gets underway. Starting with the first action in the action queue, everyone preforms that action. Most of the actions can happen simultaneously, as there aren’t any more choices to make. If you said you were going to bolster or build or tax in a province, you just, do that. It’s the combats that need to take place in player order. Combat is simple, you just take a number of cubes from a province and push them into a neighbouring region. If another player was there, you scoop up all the cubes now in that province and dump them into the cube tower. Whoever has the majority of cubes in that tray gets control of the province. In the case of a tie, control returns to the neutral peasants, and any unrest or buildings in that province are cleared away.
Shogun manages to create some stand up and shout exciting moments. There was one game where the purple player pushed his 5 cubes into my 2 cube province, and I managed to hold onto the province by a single cube. Then the immediate next action was another player attacking a province that had only a single purple cube. Well, those 4 extra cubes that got caught in the tower came out in force, drastically shuffling the distribution of forces on the island.
The gameplay is smooth, once you start resolving that action row, only slowing down when it’s time to count tiny cubes in that tower. The phase in which you’re planning your turn and programming your actions, however, can be fairly long as there is a lot to consider. It’s a real saving grace that everyone is doing that phase at the same time, otherwise Shogun‘s playtime could easily balloon to 3 hours. The analysis paralysis here is real.
In addition to keeping the other players off your territory, you also need to contend with the neutral peasants. They’re the faction you fight against whenever you battle against an empty province, and they revolt when you attempt to tax them too much. If you happen to take over someone else’s province that they taxed previously, those unrest tokens don’t go with them, the peasantry is still angry, despite the change in management. If you ever lose control of a province, either to another player or to a revolt,
There’s a lot to consider in Shogun, especially as each round inflicts an event on everyone. These can range from getting a minimum or maximum tax, to forbidding combat in provinces that have a temple. While you know what the events MIGHT be, you won’t know which one is actually in effect until after you’ve committed your actions to specific provinces.
After 3 action rounds, a 4th scoring round occurs. First, everyone loses some rice, then you must have 1 rice for every province you control. If you don’t, you suffer a number of revolts. This can be pretty punishing, especially when someone manages to attack the province you were going to tax rice in before you were able to tax said rice. The joys of action programming.
Last week I wrote about Arcs, a game where every mechanism and decision feels deliberate and worth discussing. Every mechanism and decision that Cole Wherle put into that design is worth talking about. By direct contrast, Shogun feels boring, flat, and uninteresting. And yet, I had fun playing Shogun. If both Arcs and Shogun were set up on tables with empty seats, I’d sit down to play Shogun every single time. It’s not that it’s a better-designed game, because it’s not. But because it reminds me of why I play games in the first place: to have fun. Shogun isn’t a masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. The best game is the one that gets played, and for me, I’m so much more keen to play Shogun. I’m not sure if that’s an endorsement for Shogun or an indictment for Arcs, but in the end, only one of those games makes me laugh, cheer, and want to play again.
I’m going to begin with the conclusion. Arcs is a masterpiece. It’s a game bursting with so much variety, discovery, and depth, all crafted meticulously by designer Cole Wehrle. Every mechanic feels intentional, every element serves a greater purpose, there isn’t an ounce of unnecessary bloat. It’s a work of art and genius in game design, a triumph that deserves all the praise in the world. It’s just a shame that I don’t like playing it.
Arcs at its core, is a ghost of a trick taking game. That said, even labelling it that way will give players the wrong direction. A player leads a card, and the card has a number and a suit, and players are generally encouraged to follow the lead card with a card of the same suit but with a higher number. But they don’t have to. Each card gives the player access to specific actions, and affords them a number of action points. The lead player gets full use of their card, and everyone else has to react to it. If you play a higher card of the same suit, it’s called Surpassing, and you get the full benefit of your card, but as the cards go up in numerical value, they offer less and less action points. You can choose to pivot, playing any card face up and taking a single action of the card you just played, or play a card face down to copy the actions on the lead card, again, only for a single action.
There’s both great flexibility and strong restrictions in this action selection mechanism. On one hand, being able to copy or pivot almost guarantees that you can do something helpful on your turn. On the other hand, if you don’t have a specific action, like Secure in your hand, and no one leads with that suit, you are completely blocked out from that action.
I’ve said before that Arcs has a fascinating approach to action efficiency. Unlike Euro-style games where you almost always want to have the most actions, or you can plan a long series of events that will pay out in dividends, Arcs is much more tactical. Action efficiency in Arcs doesn’t mean you take the most actions or turns, it means that you take the one pivotal action that swings the game from a crushing loss to an overwhelming defeat.
Everything you choose to do, or choose not to do, in Arcs has consequences. When you lead, you can choose to declare an ambition, depending on the value of the card you play. Doing so, activates one of the end of round scoring conditions, but it also drops the value of your card to a 0, making it likely that every player after you will have several actions to play with when they surpass your 0. Just in that choice alone, you need to weigh the balance of which card you want to play to declare the ambition vs. which and how many actions that card gives you access too. If you use an aggression card to declare the Warlord ambition, you’re probably going to trigger a lot of combat in the round. But waiting to declare an ambition is risky too. Ambitions can only be declared 3 times per round, and they can be consumed quick, and they get less valuable as they’re declared. You also just might not have the opportunity to be first in the round again.
Everything in Arcs has a purpose. The game gives you dozens of levers to pull, and understanding which lever to pull and when is critical to doing well in Arcs. Then you add The Blighted Reach expansion, and it takes the base game of arcs and stretches it into a 3 game space opera. Every player begins as one of 8 factions, each with their own personal objective, abilities, and character. After the first act ends, players who completed their objective draws a single new faction and gets the choice to either pivot to a wholly new set of abilities, or keep the faction that you’re currently playing and follow their story a bit longer. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Blighted Reach introduces a crumbling empire. Every player starts out as a regent of the empire, with one player being the first regent. They control the empire’s coffers, and gain benefits when the empire does battle. In addition to the normal action cards, there are now event cards that can trigger a summit, where players can leave the empire, and negotiate trades with each other. You can even trade future favours that can be cashed in later to force a player to negotiate with you. While a regent, all regents have to be friendly while big daddy empire is watching. Empire ships control regions by default where they have ships, and you can drag empire ships along with yours to battle and defend against non-regent players. As I said before, all the factions you play as have their own objectives, some of which may encourage you to bolster the empire’s forces, while others will encourage you to leave their fold.
The space opera bit is absolutely intriguing. A full campaign is 3 games long, and at the end of each game, some things get reset. Damaged ships and thrown out, damaged blight get stronger, captives and trophies are returned to other players, and factions that change return their favours. But the guild cards you’ve earned up to this point persist perpetually, the resources you’ve acquired, you retain, and in general, the ships and buildings you’ve produced remain on the board. The intermission is less of a full game reset, and more of a seventh inning stretch. You get up, shuffle some things around, digest your new objective, and launch into the game once again. This means that if you’re ready to write off a game, you can just focus on setting yourself up for the next one, putting yourself into a good position instead of scrapping for points in the short term.
There is so much to explore in Arcs. 24 factions, some of which change multiple times in a game, exploring the effects of moving from one faction to another. The objectives drive players to explore different corners of strategy, and keep the game state in perpetual flux. The first regent might have a monopoly on a resource, but then suddenly an outlaw pops up and robs them blind, throwing the balance of power completely off kilter. Another faction that seemed down-and-out switches into a mothership, pulling all their cities and star ports off the board, and plonking down a single, massive ship to control from then on. Even at the concluding act, anyone with a C faction has an instant win condition, meaning that a player who’s been struggling for the entire game still has a chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Arcs is an aggressive area control game, a tight resource management game, and an intriguing above the table political game all at the same time. To be good at Arcs, you always want to be changing and positioning yourself to make the game pivot from one ambition to the other. Chasing the goals that have already been claimed is a fools’ errand, and there’s enough manoeuvrability in the game system to allow for the balance of power to be upset that in theory, you could figure out a way to upset the other players in interesting and unexpected ways.
So why don’t I like it then? For starters, it’s unique and hard. And that seems like a weird complaint. In what world is being unique a bad thing, especially in what can be such a crowded market like board games? Shouldn’t I be complaining about the umpteenth ‘new worker placement deck building game’ that hits my table week after week? Well, being unique means I have nothing else to really compare it to, I don’t have a foundation for the rules and mechanisms that have becomes so second nature to me. Instead, I have to keep all the rules of all the aspects of Arcs in my head, which is a significant burden, especially as the person at my table who is the arbiter of the rules. I can’t tell you how many times over all my plays I have to say “no, you can’t do that.” and “No stop, that’s not how that works.” or “No, first you need to do X, then you can do Y”. There’s a lot of nuance to the rules, and in Arcs, the nuance is IMPORTANT. It’s important that you prelude before you take your actions, it’s important that you can’t surpass with an off suit card, it’s important that you have to be the one to call a summit to force negotiations with your favours. All the restrictions that make the decision-making really satisfying also make it really tedious to manage a table. My head aches after a single act, and by the end of the second act, I’m looking for ways to escape the table.
Somehow, Arcs manages to make me feel like there’s nothing I can do to upset someone’s stranglehold on the economy, and that no advantage I hold is ever safe from the bastards who sit around the table with me. In the short game, trying to amass an army feels like Sisyphean task, by the time you’ve built your starports and generated the ships, someone pulls up and swats them down to claim the warlord achievement, and then the game comes to a screaming end.
In the long game, there are so many character powers and different objectives that have rules on cards clear across the table, that it’s impossible to remember exactly what everyone can do, and what you should be doing to stop them. I won’t complain that factions are unbalanced, I’m nowhere near experienced to make that claim. But Arcs demands a certain level of mastery for players to really revel in its system. It’s a system that utterly rewards mastery, but getting to that point requires so much enthusiasm and repeated commitment from everyone at the table.
Arcs is a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece in the sense that board game enthusiasts who have been around for a while will see how finely crafted this work is. While it’s a big, beefy box, nothing is extra, nothing is extraneous. Everything in Arcs has a purpose. It’s the Symphony No. 9 of board games, it shows Cole Wehrle’s complete and utter skill, creativity, and mastery as a board game designer. Every little aspect of the game is intresting and worth talking about (as evidenced by Shut Up and Sit Down’s two 40minute reviews). But in the end, when I play Arcs, I don’t feel joy in my heart. I don’t have fun when I’m playing this game. I’m stuck in my head trying to remember the flowchart for movement as a regent, and trying to figure out how I can snag initiative so I can declare an ambition without having that ambition yanked out from under me. It’s probably just a skill issue, really.
Creating the Top 100 Games of All Time list back in March highlighted how I’ve never really covered some of my favourite games. I’m slowly working through that backlog by creating a review as I play these games again.
In Flamme Rogue by designer Asger Harding Granerud, you run a team of cyclists, a Rouleur and a Sprinteur. Your goal is to get one of your cyclists over the finish line first, doesn’t matter which one claims the victory as long as the win goes to one of your characters. The game is played simply, draw four cards from one of your characters decks, each card depicting a number of spaces to move, and set it aside. Put your cards on the bottom of your deck face up, then do the same with your second character. Once all players have committed their cards, they’re all revealed simultaneously. Then, starting from the racer currently in first, they move those spaces. After everyone has moved, slip streaming occurs. Starting from the racer in last place, every racer who has one space between them and the next racer gets one free movement to ‘catch up’ to the rest of the pack. Then, anyone at the front of the pack takes an exhaustion card into their deck. After that, everyone draws more cards and keep repeating this process until someone passes the finish line.
There are some tricks to the track. Downhill sections will automatically boost your low cards to be a 5, while uphill sections don’t let you move any more than 5 at a time. Usually the track has enough space for 2 riders to sit side by side, but in certain points it’ll choke down to 1, potentially forcing players in the rear to lose movement if they can’t fully surpass the leaders.
The Rouleur and Sprinteur decks have some differences. The Sprinteur has cards ranging from 2 to 9, while the Rouleur has a much more moderate spread from 3 to 7. Something that may not have been clear from the above paragraph, is that as you use your cards, they aren’t returned to your deck. Your sprinter only has three 9 cards in their whole deck. Once they’re spent, he loses a lot of his edge. Flamme Rouge is a deck deconstruction game where you need to manage your resources carefully to come out ahead.
Unlike many race games, there’s no engine building, or sense of acceleration in Flamme Rouge. Instead, it’s an endurance grind. Spending all of your best cards, leaving it all out on the track in the hopes that you’ll be the first player to cross that finish line. In the game I played last night, my Rouleur had 12 cards in their deck at the end of the game. One 4, one 6, and ten 2’s. The finish line was 3 spaces away, and I had a two space lead from the rest of the pack. I shuffled the deck, drew my cards, and managed to pull a 4 to win the race.
Flamme Rouge is a game about micro decisions and opportunities. You won’t always have the right cards at the right time, but rarely are you left without something to consider. Ideally, you want your racers together, so you can draft and slipstream. Let one character take the exhaustion for the first half of the race, so the second racer is fresh for the last half. Being ahead early is exciting, because you’re first to move and no one can block your path, but being in front fills your deck with exhaustion, so there’s quite a lot of risk there.
While it can feel like a lot of luck, I feel that there is quite a bit of skill involved in winning Flamme Rouge. Being able to accurately read your opponent’s intensions, knowing when they’re going to try to overtake, so you can keep the gap close. It is frustrating when you can see that you have the perfect opportunity to overtake, but you only draw a handful of low cards, but that’s life sometimes. Sometimes you step on your pedal and your chain skips a link.
Thematically, everyone can relate to riding a bike, or the concept of a bicycle race. Having a relatable theme makes it incredibly easy to get people who may otherwise be uninterested in board games to the table. The aesthetic is sufficiently goofy as well, with the riders all sporting thick french moustaches and making exaggerated faces in the card art. Flamme Rouge is a good-looking game!
I really like the variety of the tracks in Flamme Rouge. Each section of track is double-sided and fit together like a puzzle. The game comes with a small deck of cards emulating specific races, and depending on how the track is set up, the way the game feels can change drastically. One track we played on had 2 downhill sections that let those early leaders shed their exhaustion and run away with the race. Another game had 3 uphill sections leading right up to the finish line, making the final push an utter grind. The winner ended up being one of the players who was near the back during the final assent, as they had burned all their real low cards early on and managed to play three 5’s in a row while everyone else was struggling with 2’s and 3’s.
Flamme Rouge is simple to play, yet it’s eminently satisfying. Races are always exciting, and controlling two characters lets you play with the system in a fun and interesting way that lends to satisfying, clever plays. I love the variability of the track, and how different setups ensure each game feels fresh. Flamme Rouge shines as a game that balances short-term tactics with long-term strategy, and is a game that deserves its high spot in my top 100 games of all time.
Board game burnout has come up as a topic of conversation within my circles lately. A friend who has been out of the hobby for a few years recently asked, “What have been the new, fresh, must play games over the last 5 years? Games that are different and really do something that thing else has really done before?”
Honestly, I had a fairly hard time answering that question. For me, Bullet❤️ has been a break-out hit, Beyond the Sun is one that feels fresh, but beyond that, everything kind of feels like it’s treading old ground. A tweak here, a twist there, and a bam, the hot new game feels like something we’ve already played.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit our biases, we generally play midweight euro games, and don’t really deviate from that genre, but still. Even my favourite games that were new to me just felt like twists on games I’ve already played. Akropolis is NMBR 9 crossed withKingdomino. Cat in the Box is a trick taking game with a twist. It’s a super cool twist, but a trick taking game, nevertheless.
This conversation inspired me to pull out some of the games on my shelf of shame that I felt could be unique. One of which is Picture Perfect, designed by Anthony Nouveau and published by Arcane Wonders in 2020.
In Picture Perfect, a party has already happened and everyone had a great time. Now, your goal is to commemorate the party by taking the perfect picture. Every guest has preferences, some want to be in the centre, others have friends they simply must stand by, and others have a slight vendetta against others and their preference is that someone else’s face is hidden. All of these preferences are achieved by putting preference cards into little envelopes for each character. The whole game is taking a small subset of preference cards, arranging your characters as you see fit, then flipping over a card to determine how the character envelops will shuffle around the table.
Each round, hopefully you’ll get access to more characters so you can try and accommodate as many preferences as you can. There’s a strong memory element in play here, as once you’ve passed a characters’ envelope on, you may never see it again. Hopefully you’ll remember that the dog really didn’t want to be next to any man, or that the fern really wanted to be next to the table, no matter how inconvenient that may be for the other characters.
There’s no limit to how often or when you want to move the characters on your board. If you find that you’ve completely forgotten everything about a specific person, you can just take them off the board. Everyone has a player shield, so you can’t copy what your opponents are scheming, but you can choose to rearrange your entire party at a moment’s notice.
Scoring at the end of the game has an exciting reveal element to it. Once all 6 rounds have concluded, all players lay down their player shields, and one by one, each character has their preferences revealed, and each player scores points based on how many of those preferences were achieved. If all 3 preferences were met, a big 6 points. 2 out of the 3 will net you 3 points, a single preference met is 1 point, and missing all 3 preferences will lose you 3 points. The saving grace here is that you don’t score any characters that you chose not to place on your board.
Picture Perfect plays like a parlour game. The mechanics are light, and if you aren’t playing the bidding variant, there’s no way to really interact with your opponents, other than to just be better than them. You can try to do sneaky things, like keep a specific character’s envelope for an entire game, but players don’t have to place every character. The game mechanics are really just about getting more information, there are no systems in your way, handcuffing your ability to shuffle characters, and I really like that aspect.
The game comes with an auction variant built in, which you can play with right from the start. It shuffles a couple of action cards into the information swapping deck, so instead of swapping directly, each player can choose one of the envelopes they have in their possession to auction. You spend the items on your table, which are worth points in the end.
One of the biggest critiques I have for Picture Perfect, is that you can feel like you have no control, or that some of your decisions are arbitrary. Maybe you’ll get access to a character you need, and maybe you won’t. Maybe the characters in your possession will have conflicting preferences, so you can’t actually fully satisfy them. That’s the luck of the draw, as the preferences are randomized every game. I do like the envelope system where you stuff each character full of preferences for every game, that does give it a little bit of replayability, or at the very least, prevents me from memorizing what that little doggie wants.
So if mastery is not an option, I would really like for some more variability, however. Some variety in the preferences and more ways to swap information would give Picture Perfect some replayability. I know there have been a few expansions added, each one throwing in a new wrinkle, such as burglars, Sherlock and Watson trying to solve a murder, and movie stars showing up to steal the spotlight. I haven’t played with any of the expansions, but they don’t seem to mess with the core of the game at all. You are still swapping envelopes and arranging people, these expansions would just add another layer of considerations into the mix.
Picture Perfect isn’t a game where you can strategize your way to victory. At best, you can improve your memory and take calculated risks. It’s not meant to be a grand strategic experience; instead, it’s a light-hearted game about shifting friends around a table. The gameplay is light and lends itself to conversation and laughter, making it a delightful way to spend 30 minutes with friends. While it’s not a must-buy, I’d happily play Picture Perfect again if someone suggested it. There are definitely worse ways to spend your time.
Way back in mid 2016 I was in this precarious position of really falling deep into the hobby. My awareness of Kickstarter was ramping up dramatically, and the game that was generating a ton of buzz at that moment was Massive Darkness, designed by Raphaël Guiton, Jean-Baptiste Lullien, and Nicolas Raoult, and published by CMON.
Something in my brain latched onto this project. I’ve always wanted to get into miniature painting (no I haven’t), I’ve been looking for a great dungeon crawl adventure game (No I wasn’t), It’s solo-able, I’ve been searching for a good solo game (No I hadn’t), and surely after many successful Kickstarters, CMON would deliver a quality product, right?
Logically, there were plenty of things I didn’t like about Massive Darkness. From the fairly flat art style to the sign-off at the bottom of every update: “For the Darkness is Massive and full of terrors!”, a cheap and blatant rip-off of the mantra of the Red Priestess in Game of Thrones “For the night is dark and full of terrors.”
Emotionally, on the other hand, I wanted it. I put my money down and then began to pour over the updates and excitedly squeal at the unlocked stretch goals. Once the campaign ended, the waiting began. I stopped fervently hunting for the latest updates, and just let it sit in the back of my mind that one day, the game would arrive at my doorstep.
One day I got an attempted delivery slip in my mailbox, so I biked down to my local post office and handed them the slip. The box I got in return was about half the size of my fridge. I precariously balanced the box on my bike and walked it home. I excitedly and terrifyingly pulled box after box out of that package, not realizing how Kickstarter Stretch Goals really worked. Never before had I seen a game that took up more than one box, and now half a dozen boxes were cluttering up my dining room table.
Massive Darkness is fairly straightforward to play, despite the 30-page rule book. On your turn you have 3 actions, which you can Move, Attack or Interact. There are certain restrictions depending on if you’re in a tile with enemies, or if you’re changes to your abilities if you’re standing in a lighted tile or not, but the core of the game isn’t that complex.
Each adventure in Massive Darkness starts with a dozen decks of cards and a series of rooms laid out as dictated by the scenario you’re playing. Each adventure starts at level one, and as you progress through the dungeon, you’ll reach checkpoints that advance the game up to level 5, making the loot better, and the enemies stronger.
Enemies spawn at the end of each round (usually), or when doors are opened. Whenever a monster is spawned, it’s spawned with a ‘boss’ and their ‘mob’. The whole group acts as one, but it’s an excuse to place 4 or 5 of the goblin minis onto the table at once, and they’re not much other than glorified health markers for the mob. One interesting aspect of the game is that each enemy is spawned with a loot card, and if that loot card matches the type of attack that the enemy does, it’s added to their dice pool when combat happens, making them slightly more unique than just a standard opponent. A downside to this mechanic is when an early game monster spawns in with a relatively decent defense loot, they can become quite difficult for your early game gear to handle.
Combat is managed entirely with dice, and the die that come with Massive Darkness are quite satisfying. They’re large, have well-rounded corners and are brightly coloured. My only nitpick is the limitation of 3 die per colour, giving an attacker a maximum of 6 dice. I just like rolling buckets of dice, okay?? In combat, the attacking player gathers all the attack die (red and yellow) that they generate via their skills and equipment, and all the defence die (blue and green) that their enemy generates (including loot cards) and rolls them all together. The swords and the shields cancel each other out, and the BAM and diamond symbols may trigger any additional effects, depending on the abilities and equipment of the attacking hero and their equipment.
That’s really the crux of the game. Variety comes in the numerous heroes, who all have their own innate abilities, and the ability to mix and match classes with each hero, giving them further unique abilities. Some make sense, like having the warrior character play the barbarian class, but sometimes it’s fun to mix them up, like having the rogue character take on the blood mage class.
A component I really like is the plastic character tray, with indented slots for weapons and armour. The tray also has a pegboard for tracking health and EXP that you’ll spend on skills. If you’re playing the campaign version of the game, there’s another track to mark your “Micro-XP”, but the campaign rules are trash, and you really shouldn’t bother with them.
The real draw of Massive Darkness is all the big boss monsters. These minis stand head and shoulders above the rest and are usually quite a bit harder to take down. They can either be the core of a scenario (like having to chase down a giant spider before it gets out of the cave), or, they can just spawn in randomly. Usually, they can be defeated, and the sense of accomplishment upon doing so is really quite wonderful.
Each individual scenario usually has a goal for all the players to achieve together, either get through the tunnel, or search a specific space to find an item, then make it to the exit. As the game wears on, the event deck throws numerous baddies your way, but the only ‘timer’ in the game (unless a scenario specifically puts one on you) is the heroes’ health bars. Getting stronger gear and tweaking your character with new abilities based on their class is a fun experience, and the power and strength you feel when you wipe out an entire mob in a single blow is the kind of experience you remember and cheer for.
Massive Darkness isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. It accomplishes what it promised and delivers a ‘Dungeon Master-free dungeon crawl’ experience. It has exciting dice rolls and makes you and your friends feel like big damn heroes when you emerge victorious! The real problem with Massive Darkness is that shoehorned campaign element I mentioned earlier. The idea of slowing down your character growth by a factor of 5 just so you can try to emulate a sense of epic progression over multiple plays makes the ‘campaign’ element feel cheap and tacked on. Massive Darkness is so utterly satisfying when you play the scenarios as one-offs experiences. This also allows you to play with all the different characters and classes, as the combinations are nearly endless! Locking yourself into one hero and one class for half a dozen games isn’t fun, and I can almost guarantee that at the beginning of the campaign you’ll be looking at the advanced abilities with utter excitement, but by the time you’ve unlocked them, you really just won’t care anymore.
I think Massive Darkness is great when played as a power fantasy, ‘beer and pretzels’ game, if you will. If you come into this expecting some all new mechanics and a deep, rich lore, you’re really better off playing a video game. Massive Darkness does have the ability to craft an emergent narrative as you storm your way through the nests of goblins and slay the massive creatures that want nothing more than to rend your flesh from your bones. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a lot of experiences with games of this ilk, so I can’t speak to how it holds up against some others in the genre. All I can say is that I have a ton of fun when Massive Darkness hits my table, although the set-up ensures that my games are few and far between.
Personally, my favourite experience in Massive Darkness was when I was playing as the ranger and I stood at the end of a long hallway. A massive boss monster spawned behind us and was charging up. I sidled to the end of the hallway, and spent all my actions attacking it. I knocked off less than half it’s health, and it moved two steps forward. I was almost within it’s striking distance, I attacked twice more, the first attack did some decent damage, but the second roll missed entirely. I had one action remaining, and my escape was blocked. On the next enemy phase, that monster would surely grab me by the ankles and smash me into the ground like the Hulk and Loki. I took a deep breath and rolled a massive amount of hits and absolutely no defence for the boss. It came crashing down, dead at my feet. My friend looked over at me and said, “That still only counts as one!”
I also joined The Omnigamers Club on their podcast to talk about The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth. Available on all podcatchers and on YouTube!
I love 7 Wonders Duel, much more than the full 7 player game. In fact, it’s one of my most played games due to the fact that my partner and I played it over and over when it first came out, and it was one of my very first board game reviews on this site! Then we got the Pantheon expansion, and played it even more, falling in love with the new dynamics the expansion brought to the game. I think in total, I have something like 50 plays of the game, making it one of my most played games of all time.
Suffice to say, I was at the very least intrigued with The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth was announced. It’s a retheme and redevelopment of 7 Wonders Duel, and this new game folds in elements from both of the expansions while simplifying and streamlining the whole experience.
For those that haven’t played 7 Wonders Duel, The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle Earth was designed by Antoine Bauza and Bruno Cathala. It’s a two player card drafting game where one player takes on the role of the Fellowship while the other controls the forces of Sauron, and are competing to be the first player to achieve one of the three victory conditions, which include getting the ring into Mount Doom/catch the nasty Hobbitses, have control of every region of Middle Earth, or, gather the support of all 6 races.
Players take turns drafting from a tableau of cards in the middle of the table. You can only take cards that are uncovered, and around half the cards are face down, which only get revealed once they’re fully uncovered. Most of the cards have costs, and if you’re ever lacking in resources, you can substitute a gold coin for one resource at any time. The cards you’re drafting have various benefits. The grey cards offer persistent resources to pay for cards down the road, yellow cards offer money, which is spent for resources you’re missing. Blue cards which advance the ring track, red cards which allow you to deploy troops around middle earth, and green cards which represent the support of a specific race.
There is also a shared display of landmark tiles which either player can purchase. If they do so, they gain the benefits listed on that landmark tile, but do not take a card from the tableau, which is very important if you’re trying to force your opponent to reveal a specific card for you. The game is played over 3 ages, and should the 3rd age come to an end and neither player has satisfied any of the victory conditions, then the player who controls the majority of regions in middle earth is declared the winner.
The theme here is more of a window dressing than anything else. While it’s difficult to imbue theme in a game where you’re just drafting cards, the theme in Duel for Middle Earth falls away really quickly, especially when drafting the red cards, and you just magically air drop soldiers into various regions across the board. That said, the ring track is a clever and thematic way to track 10 steps. That track could have just been a series of steps with each player moving their cube up the steps, but the plastic overlay showing the Hobbits making a break for Mount Doom, and the black rider nipping at their heels feels a lot more exciting.
There’s lots of decision-making in choosing which card to take so you can further your own goals, and which cards to leave for your opponent. A lot of the game can boil down to “I want this specific card” so you count backwards all the turns it’ll take until your opponent reveals that card for you. Or, if the order is off, you have to consider buying a landmark to offset the order of taking cards from the pyramid so you can get the card you need.
Each of the 3 victory conditions are very easy to parse, which helps build tension when one player starts to go a bit heavier into one of those conditions. And part of that tension comes from trying to goad your opponent into overcommitting into one of the victory conditions, but not enough for them to actually win. If you can get your opponent to make sub-optimal moves just to deny you a card, you’ll likely come away with the victory.
Comparing it to 7 Wonders Duel, Duel for Middle Earth has been smoothed to a polished stone. All the wonky rules have been shaved off, everything is easier, and you’re able to calculate anything at a glance. Duel for Middle Earth is fascinating in that it managed to fold in the core aspect of both expansions into a package that feels lighter and easier to play than it’s predecessor. But because the game is smoother, it feels flatter. There’s less texture to grab onto. All of my games really felt largely the same, and I’m much less keen to replay Duel for Middle Earth, unlike 7 Wonders Duel, especially when playing with the expansions.
Because it’s simpler, a single game took me and my partner, like, 15 minutes. We set up, learned how to play, and played it twice within an hour. Not drafting wonders gets players playing quickly, and because the landmark tiles are available to both players, it doesn’t feel like someone has an unfair advantage and you’re just biding your time until they’ve triggered their wonders. There’s also less ‘remove a card from your opponent’ actions, meaning there’s less feel bad moments, but there’s much less ‘take another turn’ options, meaning there are less big, exciting turns
It feels like you’re unable to build an engine, unlike in 7 Wonder Duel. One of my favourite things was to take as many of the yellow cards as possible, so I could trash a card and get, like, 8 coins in one go. It feels like some depth has been lost, there’s less space to play and explore, especially when you include those expansions. The Pantheon expansion specifically, the whole first age is vying for the privilege of drafting which Gods are available to you, and slotting them into spots for you and your opponent to buy them next age. Drafting a God that does nothing for your opponent, and using it to fill their cheapest slot, is really lost.
All that being said, Going back to 7 Wonders Duel feels super clunky now. Trying to calculate how much you and your opponent would have to pay for every one of the cards gets tedious, real fast. It really highlights just how streamlined Duel for Middle Earth is. While I don’t think Duel for Middle Earth as it stands now will replace 7 Wonders Duel plus it’s expansions for me, I would absolutely use Duel for Middle Earth for anyone who hasn’t played 7 Wonders Duel before. It’s light and easy to play, the perfect game to play on a weekday night, or as a warm-up to a much larger game. Be sure you leave extra time when you pull it off the shelf, however. It’s the kind of game that begs you to play it two or three times in a row. And at the end of the day, the best game is the one that gets played, so that’s one of the highest compliments I can give.
