Mechanics: Deck Building, Narrative Adventure, Pick up and Deliver, Legacy
Introduction
It’s kind of amazing how Legacy games rose and fall over the last decade. What started back in 2011 with Risk Legacy, and rose to provenance in 2015 with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, there was a time when Legacy games were all the rage, when board game hobbyists were clamouring for more campaigns. Original games like Seafall and Charterstone promised a unique game experience instead of using a ‘tried and true’ existing game as their foundation. Ultimate Werewolf, Machi Koro, and Betrayal at House on the Hill all produced Legacy versions of their popular games.
If you were anything like me, we went from a dearth to a glut of half-finished campaigns. It turns out, committing to play the same game 12 – 24 times is actually quite a tall order. With 4 players, all of whom have different tastes, and new games always on the way, choosing to return to a Legacy game means not playing whatever new, exciting game for another week. And then one of your friends decides to start a board game blog, and is always pushing to play something new, so he can produce new content, and you’re left with boxes of half finished games on your shelf. What scum.
How to Play
Clank! is a deck building game, in which players are delving into a dangerous mine to steal the most valuable artifact they can get their hands on, then escape with their loot. Each player starts the game with a deck of 10 cards, containing some boots for movement, some burgle, that grants some skill, which allows you to buy new cards, and a two stumble cards, which simply produce the titular resource, clank.
As players play cards, acquire new cards, and move deeper into the dungeon, they will inevitably produce clank, which represents the noise you make. After buying cards from the market row to augment and power up your abilities, the new cards that come out may have a symbol that triggers the dragon to attack. When this happens, all the clank that has been produced gets swept up into a bag, then, some cubes are drawn. If your colour comes out, OUCH! It gets placed on your health bar, and should you ever reach 10 damage, you’re out of the game. As you and your fellow thieves manage to ransack the dungeon, the dragon will get angrier, and draw more cubes each time an attack happens. If you die while in the underground, you’re the dragon’s dinner. You don’t get the opportunity to score your points, and no one remembers your name. If you die while in the above ground, hurrah! The local villagers haul your maimed body to the inn, where you can recount your tale of danger. Even better, if you manage to return to the starting spot with an artifact in hand, you earn a bonus 20 points.
Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated takes this gameplay, and adds in some story beats. A narrative set in the Penny Arcade universe, with extra goals and bonus objectives that can help or hinder your party should you manage to complete, or fail to satisfy before the end of each game. As each game progresses, you’ll be tearing up contract cards, placing new location stickers on the board, augmenting cards, and adding bonuses to specific spots on the board. Each game will end with a winner, the player who earned the most points, and a Associate Spotlight, the player who managed to accomplish the objective set by the story at the start of the game.
Review
My experience playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was a bit odd. We bought the game as a group and broke it out during our first Cabin-con. We played 4 games back to back, and I was utterly in love. There was so much discovery, so many things to sticker, branching paths in the narrative, I was deliriously enjoying the experience. The last game of that weekend saw my character at the bottom of the map while everyone else was nearly out, spelling an almost certain doom for me. I choose to accept my fate and push further to get the last story beat, which just so happened to reveal a genie, granting me a massive 20 point relic, and teleporting me out of the danger zone. That was one of the few games I won.
My goal while playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was never to get the highest score. Instead, I always chased down what thought the associate spotlight award was going to be. I would beeline to the spots on the map that would have us reading from the book, I would eschew ‘good’ cards if they didn’t help me fulfill the available contracts. More than once, I sacrificed my game to satisfy my need for discovery.
Each play of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated took between 2 and 3 hours. Every few turns there’s a new paragraph to be read, stickers to apply, and conditions to update. I loved it, but constantly having to stop, and read, and sticker utterly broke the flow of the game. In the latter half of the campaign, the discovery slowed down. A lot fewer stickers were being placed, only a handful of contracts were available, and the deck of cards left to unlock was gradually getting thinner. Even with the discovery elements waning, each game still managed to introduce new mechanics that would keep the game from getting stale.
After that first day where we played 4 games in a row, it took us a further year and half to finish the next 8 games. Every couple of months we’d break it out, need to re-learn the nuance of the legacy elements. None of us were major fans of the base game of Clank, which Acquisitions Incorporated was based off of, but we knew the gist. We’d often forget how some of the elements that were unlocked in our previous game worked, and we’d often forget the bonuses that we unlocked at our pub, because that board would be way off at the end of the table. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a table hog, spanning the entire breadth of my average sized dining table, and still needing spare chairs for the boxes, books, and sticker sheets. Furthermore, we’d forget the nuance of how the shrines worked, or that we had to draw vault cards at the start of each mission. I suspect this wouldn’t have been a problem if we had less time between each games, but, when your game group priortizes new games over old ones as ours does, there’s only so much you can do. It weirdly felt like learning a new game, every time we sat down to play.
I don’t know if Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is strictly better than the base game of Clank!. Now that we’re done, none of us feel compelled to keep the giant box that held everything. There’s literally a 0% chance one of us will want to play a ‘normal’ game of Clank! on that legacy board. At least with the base game (or one of the sequels that offer a spin on the main layout) I’d feel compelled to play with people who are new to the deck building genre of board games. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a behemoth on the shelf, taking up too much space, and now that we’ve finished the story, there’s a dozen little rules that’d I’d have to teach that when introduced over time, aren’t too onerous, but when thrown in all at once, can be a bit overwhelming.
Luck and balance aren’t things that I want to harp on, as with every deck builder, there is some element of luck. Pulling enough boots at a critical moment, or getting just the right amount of skill points, allowing you to get a powerful card at the perfect time, isn’t something that can really be balanced for. The deck of cards that makes up the offer is thick. There are few duplicates in the deck, making the offer feel different every time. That said, it really sucks when someone manages to score an excellent combo of cards, letting them pull off amazing turns, whilst your turn is “move two spaces, get 3 skill points, produce one clank. Oh look, all the cards cost 4 or more, so I guess I’ll take another explore card.”
The narrative of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is funny. My friend, Bear did a fantastic job as the role of the narrator. Perfectly assuming the accents of various rogues and rapscallions. Even with humourous writing and a great narrator, the story didn’t really grip us. One disconnect I had, was that we were all members of the same crew, the titular Acquisitions Incorporated, but at no point is this a cooperative game. Several times the story nudged us in the direction of collaboration, such as not letting the opposing crew, the Dran Enterprises steal our clients, but there wasn’t any real push to collaborate, other than for the joy of the story. As a group of mechanically driven people, it wasn’t enough for us. For each of us, our goal was to win the game, and/or, get the highest score possible. Collaborating would generally be in direct conflict of that goal. More than once I was fusturated by the fact that the next story objective was way at the bottom of the map, so I had to choose between going after that story, or, escaping from the depths before the dragon took a chunk out of my hide. And, as soon as I commit to delving deep, someone would snag a relic, and players would start cycling the offer row, trying to trigger the dragon more and more, punishing me for my choice. It’s a great mechanic in the base game, but when Clank! Leagcy is trying to tell a story, it feels like it’s trying to play two tunes at the same time.
I’ve heard of a few people report that playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was one of their absolute best board game experiences. And some who report that they basically played the game cooperatively, The whole table would work together so they could discover the absolute most that the game had to offer. Honestly, before embarking on this legacy game, I wasn’t a very big fan of Clank! in general. And as far as legacy games go, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated had everything I want in a legacy game experience; a doublesided map to explore, tonnes of story, stickers, destroying cards, bringing new cards into the system, surprise twists, you name it. But the biggest detractor I felt is that we had to play Clank! 13 times, and had no clear indication what we were supposed to be doing. How you actually win the campaign wasn’t revealed until the entire campaign was over. I was always chasing the Associate Spotlight award, but, that was a self imposed goal. I had no idea what reward that would net me in the end. And honestly, that’s something that’s always really irked me and my game group. We like to know all the rules before we start playing, so, when we open a rulebook and see huge blank spaces to be filled in with new rules as we progress, it’s not something we actually enjoy.
One of our players admitted they weren’t having fun and bowed out halfway through the campaign, so Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated became the game that we played when that player wasn’t available for our regular game night. It took a year and half, but we actually finished it, which is more than I can say for almost every other Legacy game I’ve attempted. I’m happy that we completed the campaign, the experience was good, but I can’t say that it left me particularily satisfied. It’s not something that I would recommend to everyone. If you enjoy Clank!, this is a no brainer. It’s more of what you like, and an obligation to play it more frequently. But if you don’t have any strong feelings for Clank!, or, if you actively dislike it, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is not going to change your mind.
It might seem weird to talk about an expansion from 2008 that’s been woefully out of print for longer than I’ve even been into board games, and has a revamped and updated second edition currently available for sale. But I don’t have that second edition, I have the first edition, and I want an excuse to talk about Galaxy Trucker some more
For those uninitiated, Galaxy Trucker, designed by Vlaada Chvatil and published by Czech Games Edition in 2007 is a game in which players are tasked with building a ship in real time. Frantically flipping tiles from the centre of the board and choosing to weld them into a cohesive spaceship, then running that ramshackle boat through a gauntlet of peril, illicits so much joy in my heart. I’ve covered the base game in depth here, and it currently sits as my second favourite game of all time.
The Big Expansion is one of the few expansions that I would call necessary for anyone who’s played a fair amount of Galaxy Trucker. A lot of its additions make the game a bit more punishing, which, after you’ve played the base game half a dozen or more times, feels necessary.
Not to brag, but I have 19 plays of Galaxy Trucker under my belt, making me a veritable veteran. I’ve also played the campaign mode in the app a few times through, meaning my grasp of ship building is not to be underestimated.
My challenge, when playing with new players, is that I have a pretty good idea how to build a ship without any major deficiencies. While I haven’t memorized every tile and card in the game and know exactly how many guns a level 2 ship should have, I’m pretty good at not placing redundant components on my ship. My size lasers are two spaces apart to cover 6 squares, my shields don’t cover the same sides, I don’t have two of the same life support modules on my ship. I can intuit what parts I need for my ship fairly well, and that experience puts me two large steps ahead of my friends, who only have half a dozen plays under their belt.
And, here’s the major problem. When you play it well, Galaxy Trucker is kind of boring. If you make it through all 3 runs unscathed, well… that’s just not very exciting. I suspect the Vlaada Chvatil had similar feelings, because everything in this expansion adds complexity and difficulty. It’s like a saw-blade. In the hands of an experienced person, an excellent tool. In the hands of a child? Well, someone’s going to be upset my this metaphor…
What Does This Expansion Add?
Galaxy Trucker: The Big Expansion adds several modules.
Pieces to allow for a 5th player
New ship blueprints for the first and second adventures
A Rough Roads module, which introduces a new rule for all players
Promo adventure cards, changing up the adventures
Evil Machinations, all players get to insert a potentially devastating card into the adventure deck
New ship classes
Cyan Aliens, who offer unique benefits depending on the specialist you’ve chosen
10 new ship components, all of which add-in some major benefits, but can also have devastating drawbacks.
The new ships are brilliant for those who are experienced with the base game. The level 1 ship can be rotated in any direction, but engines still must fire backwards. These ships can also be hit on every dice roll, no longer can you rely on rolling an 11 and having that large asteroid narrowly miss your crew quarters.
The level 2 ship is actually 2 smaller ships that you need to fly in tandem. They offer many challenges, such as needing to staff and power the two halves of your ship separately, and your flight speed is set to the lower of the two ships. They have a few benefits however, like adding the firepower from both ships together, and more outside edge pieces to place guns.
Neither of these two new ships are ‘insurable’, meaning if you choose to partake in these new designs, you’re putting your wallet at stake. There is no limit to the amount of losses you need to play should your ship crumble under the weight of the galaxy. Luckily for me, playing Galaxy Trucker is never about the money.
Returning to my sentiment about surviving unscathed and how boring it is, the Rough Roads module seeks to ruin your day. A number of the Rough Roads cards are revealed before building your ship, so you can, hopefully, plan around these new rules. They can include things like, explosive batteries, if you lose a battery component, the 8 surrounding components are also lost, or, space junk, in which every piece that falls off a ship becomes a large meteor for every player behind them.
The Rough Roads’ module turns up the difficulty and chaos to its maximum value. I’ve found these cards combined with the new ships are a great way to handicap experienced players. Not all players need to adhere to these new rules, but you can decide as a group. Generally, Bigfoot and I take on the massive challenges, while Otter opts for the safe and easy routes. Again, for me, score doesn’t matter, I don’t care about balance in Galaxy Trucker. I’m here to chew bubble gum and watch ships get blow’d up. And I’m all out of bubble gum.
Who is this Expansion For?
I can definitively say that this expansion is for those who absolutely love the chaos of Galaxy Trucker, and just want more. They want harder missions, tougher ships, and unforgiving twists around every space bend. The Big Expansion (and by extension, the Keep on Trucking expansion for the second edition) breathes life and flavour into a fun and fantastic system.
That said, it also adds complexity. It turns Galaxy Trucker from a game that I can teach to anyone quickly, into a game with well over a dozen different components. The back of the expansion rule book includes a summary of all the new pieces, which I always make a point of putting near the new players, so they can quickly reference what these pieces actually do. Inevitably, they just ignore the new pieces, casting them aside because they’re too complex. It’s a lot of computations their brain can’t handle during the stress of a real time phase.
The tiles are a pain to separate out, meaning this expansion will probably live forever folded into your base game. It’s great for experienced truckers, but fresh meat need not apply.
I love the modularity of the difficulty. I enjoy the trade-offs a lot of the new pieces introduce. The new ships are wild and frenetic, and I absolutely adore everything The Big Expansion adds to Galaxy Trucker. I recognize that the base game was incredibly divisive, people either love it or hate it. If you hate Galaxy Trucker because it’s random, too chaotic, has a ‘pummel the loser’ problem, and feel dispirited when your ship falls apart, this expansion does absolutely nothing to ease those qualms. But if you’re on the ‘love it’ side of that dichotomy, The Big Expansion just gives you more to love. It’s a must-have for Galaxy Trucker fans, and I’m so glad they brought it back for Galaxy Trucker’s second edition.
Disclaimer: A copy of Trekking Through History was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
I have a trick when it comes to introducing people to hobby board games. I find the easiest, most colourful, aesthetically pleasing game with a theme that they already enjoy, and use it to ease them into the hobby. Underdog Games has been producing some very bright and vibrant games with absolutely no expense spared on the production. Neoprene mats, tarot sized cards featuring full sized art, and chunky components make for excellent introductions into board gaming. Add in an educational twist, and suddenly you’ve got a game for both parents and kids to enjoy!
How to Play
In Trekking Through History, you’re playing as time travelling tourists tearing the fabric of the space-time continuum in an effort to curate the most enriching three day vacation through mankind’s past.
Setting up the game tasks players with laying out the neoprene mat that serves as the market row and score tracker, then separate the three decks of cards based on the number in the upper right corner. Each card depicts an event in history, and prominently displays the date the event happened in the top left corner. In the bottom right corner, cards may show several symbols that you’ll earn if you choose to that the card into your Trek, while the bottom left corner tells you just how much time you’ll have to spend for that card.
On your turn, you simply take one of the cards from the row, and collect tokens matching the symbols on the card, as well as a token matching the space the card was on. The tokens fall onto your itinerary and may score you points or earn you time crystals. You move your token on the time track, and place your card into your Trek. A trek is a line of cards with an ascending date, which means if you take a historical event that happens further in the past than top card of your current trek, you’ll need to start a whole new trek (It’s also worth mentioning that you can only have one active trek at a time). Then, the player whose token is furthest back on the time track, gets to take the next turn.
The rounds ends when all players time tracker tokens reach the 12 o’clock spot. The cards in the market are wiped out, and the round 2 cards come in, which span from the earliest records of BCE, all the way to almost modern day events. After the third round, the scores are counted. Your final score is based on the points you earned during play, and each of your treks are scored based on how long they are. There’s a helpful reminder on the right side of the score track. The player with most points wins!
Review
Starting off with the physical production of Trekking Through History, the components are fantastic. All the tokens you’re collecting to fill your itinerary are made of moulded plastic, and are stored in a firm, plastic case. The player markers are large, chunky plastic stopwatches that move around the circular time board, and the main play area that contains the card river and score track is a stitched edge neoprene mat. Each of the large cards feature unique and vibrant artwork. All of this to say, the components of Trekking Through History make the game feel like a premium product!
The gameplay itself is very straightforward, pick a card, pay it’s time cost, and place it into your current trek. You’ll be compelled to wait for a card to slide along the card river, so it matches up with the bonus token that you really want, so you can earn bonuses from your itinerary. This is risky, however, as you really need to hope that other players won’t snap up your card. Treks can only move forward through time, meaning if the token you really want is associated with a card late in the timeline, you may find yourself making several shorter treks, and hoping you make up the difference in points. It’s quite satisfying when everything works out, however. There are great moments during the game where the perfect card slides into the right position, and claiming that event just so happens to trigger extra bonuses on your itinerary, rocketing your marker up the score track. When the combos hit, the game sings.
I love the time mechanic, I’ve loved the mechanic in every game I’ve played that featured it (Glen More, Patchwork, and Thebes are the games that come to mind). The cards that offer you a variety of resources, and sit further back in time require more opportunity cost to acquire, which offers an excellent trade-off. It can be frustrating when you have to take a card that launches you several spaces into the lead, then you sit there, watching the other players take turn after turn, letting the card you want slip right past the resource you needed, but the flip side is quite satisfying. If you happen to have them, the time crystals allow you to reduce the time cost when acquiring a card by 1 space per crystal you spend. We found ourselves using these to get multiple turns in a row more often than perhaps we should have, but it gave us greater control over that card market. Which in a game with narrow margins, every extra point counts!
Every card represents an event in history, and the back of the card shares some details about that event. Just like in HerStory, also by UnderDog Games, this feature educated us during our downtime of the game. Events or objects I’ve never really considered, like “Breaking the Sound Barrier with Chuck Yeager”, or “Race in the Paris-Rouen” were suddenly interesting. While waiting for my turn to come back around, I felt compelled to flip over the card. Even better were the conversations some of the cards inspired amongst my friends, like watching Freddy Mercury during the 1985 Live Aid concert. I love when a game helps pull the stories from our past, or encourages us to talk about hobbies other than the game we’re currently engaged it. It’s an easy way to introduce someone to stories from other cultures they may never have encountered otherwise.
With only 36 time to spend each game, and most cards costing between 2 – 4 time, Trekking Through History moves along quickly. Before you know it, you’ve picked up 13 cards between your three treks, and the end of the game is bearing down on you. There’s a lot of luck in the cards, considering only 6 cards are available to you when it is your turn. It can be entirely possible that there just aren’t any cards that will generate the resource you need! I don’t think Trekking Through History is the absolute best drafting or set collection game out there, but it’s one that would absolutely excel in a family setting. I wouldn’t hesitate to plop this down on a week night to encourage curiosity from the younger people in my life.
The deck of cards is thick, meaning players will always be seeing new events. The game flow is easy to follow, and it feels good when the luck just happens to fall the right way. It’s a fun and smooth game, and with the dates on the cards making each card valuable or worthless depending on the state of your current trek, it’s hard to inflict bad feelings via hate drafting. With short and long term goals pulling you in multiple directions, I felt engaged through my plays of Trekking Through History, and I really enjoyed the snippets of knowledge I acquired in between my turns. It’s attractive, fun, and quick to play. It’s probably not one that I’ll be pulling out with my regular game group often, but it’s the kind of game that I would put in front of my sister and her kids when they ask “What’s the board gaming thing you’re always going on about?”
I have very little experience with One vs. Many games. I’ve played Scotland Yard once, Betrayal at House on the Hill once, and Pandemic with the bio-terrorist expansion once. All of these experiences have been fine, but none of them have inspired a love for the genre for me. Bear backed the Beast Kickstarter, and has been eagerly anticipating its release, so, for this week’s game night, Beast was the game we played.
How to Play
Beast’s rulebook is deceptively thin, considering how much asymmetry the game holds. As a ‘1 vs many’ game, there are two halves of the conflict that need to be taught, as both sides need to know what powers and limitations the other has in order to effectively strategize.
With 6 different beasts, 6 different hunters, and 4 different contracts included in the game, there’s plenty of variety to choose from. We chose to follow the suggested first time set up with “The Great Cleansing” contract, with the Beast Fangrir being hunted by Helga and Assar. The gameplay is pretty simple, each of the characters has a set of ability cards, then, each player will draft 4 of the 16 action cards. Each card has a symbol in the centre, either red or blue, along with two potential actions at the bottom. The top action is what the heroes get to do if they play that card, while the bottom action is what the beast gets to do if they play that card.
The goal of the game is outlined on the contract, and for The Great Cleansing, the Beast had to kill two of the three villagers on the map. The hunters had to either survive until night of the third day, or, slay the beast.
The Beast is often “hidden”, with their figure on the map only denoting the Beast’s last known position. Whenever the beast moves, they play a direction card face down. If a hunter or villager manage to happen upon the Beast’s trail, the beast must put down a trail token. The Hunters have an ability to “search” a location, which, if the Beast is in that location, becomes revealed, and is now attackable. The Beast can become hidden again as soon as it moves from its spot.
Every round starts with the Beast taking their turn. Every player can play one or two cards on their turn, but only one card of each colour. No doubling up on red actions here! Around and around players take actions until someone passes. There is a rule stating that you cannot pass if someone has less action cards than you do. The round only ends once all players pass in succession.
After all players have passed, they enter the evening phase, where, both Beast and Hunters get to spend the grudges they earned during the day to unlock new abilities. Once all players have completed their evening phase, the morning begins with another action card draft. The game ends when either side of the conflict achieves their goal.
First Impressions
Asymmetric games are always difficult to grasp on the first play. Each character, Beast, and contract has their own nuances, and I can’t always foresee a character’s strengths or shortcomings and how they’ll play into the chosen scenario, so I’m always thankful when the game offers character suggestions for first time gamers to get into the experience quickly.
On the very first turn, I was able to deuce where the beast had moved to with 100% accuracy, moved into that spot, and hunted him successfully. This hit left Fangrir scared. He spent the rest of the round moving and attacking the bare minimum to accomplish his daily goal, then running away again, not leaving him exposed for a single turn.
At the start of the second day, Fangrir got a Beastly talent that allowed him to react to our Hunt card. When one of us played the Hunt card, he could spend a grudge to instantly move to an adjacent location, rendering one of our hunt cards worthless. There was one point during the second day when I was standing on the location and was 100% positive that I was on the same location as the Beast, but I didn’t have any cards with a Search ability, so, there was nothing I could do.
We chose to end the game after the second night, as it was getting quite late. It took us about 3 hours to set up, learn, and play through 2 full rounds of Beast. A lot of that length of play comes down to analysis paralysis. Both sides have a lot to consider on their turns, and when you’re staring at a hand of 8 cards trying to figure out which two you want to play, it can really slow you down. One of the games that Beast reminded me of was INIS, which is another drafting game. I imagine much like INIS, Beast gets better on repeat plays, when all players know what ability cards are available, and are more intimately familiar with both roles limitations and powers.
Bear was adamant that if we had continued into the third round, he would have taken the victory, but I’m not so sure. We needed to hit Fangrir 3 more times, while Fangrir needed to cross half the map and attack a villager. Between the two hunters, and Bears’ cautious nature, I don’t think he would have been able to pull it off without either running out of steam, or, getting pummled on the one turn he left himself vulnerable. It would really have come down to the cards that got drafted, and the reactions/items/beastly talents that would swing the game in either direction.
My big frustration with Beast came with the Beast’s hidden/reveal mechanic. I really disliked that all the Beast has to do to become hidden again is simply move, but for the hunters to find the Beast, they need to play a card with the “search” keyword. It was superbly annoying that I knew exactly where the beast was, I was standing right on top of it, but I just didn’t have a search card to play, leaving us at a weird stalemate. I feel that if I need to search to find the beast, then the beast should have a corresponding ‘hide’ keyword, or, I should be able to just attack a space that I think (or know) that they’re, and if I’m right, do damage to you, and if I’m wrong, get a punishment, like slay one of the pigs and give the Beast the corresponding grudge. Just, more freedom to actually progress toward the hunter win condition.
I don’t like games that handcuff you. The situation of “The goal of the game is to kill the beast, but you can only attack him if he’s revealed, and you only get one reveal card per round. Also, the Beast has a reaction card that nullifies that card once” really frustrated me. I suspect the reaction card to nullify the hunt card one time would be less powerful in a 4 player game, but it felt very swingy in our game, and I can only imagine would be pretty killer in a two player game.
I can really see how Beast rewards experience. The more we know what cards are in the deck, the better we can control the draft and what ability cards even get given to the beast, the better we can all find those crazy combos that make us feel powerful. I am really looking forward to learning what really makes those hunters different, and what surprises the other Beasts have in store for us. I also really wonder if that same mission would be harder or easier if we didn’t just follow the suggested Hunter setup. All things I’m excited to discover!
I recently took a minor vacation to visit my family, but travelling with a toddler is tough enough without carting around extra luggage, so I vowed to pack as leanly as possible. This meant bringing none of my games on vacation with me. Fortunately, there’s a few great game stores in Saskatoon, so I popped into a couple and one of the games I walked out with was a $12 copy of Don’t L.L.A.M.A.
Originally published as L.A.M.A, which is a German acronym that loosely translates to ‘get rid of your negative points’. In 2019 I saw the game in North America as L.L.A.M.A, and now, the version I finally bought is “Don’t L.L.A.M.A“. It’s odd that they chose to keep a name that was a German acronym, but created a separate acronym well after the original version was released. But hey, I shouldn’t judge. I’m awful at coming up with names, I can’t imagine how challenging it is applying a name and theme to what likely got sold to AMIGO as a themeless card game.
How to Play
L.L.A.M.A consists of a deck of cards, and a pile of black and white chips. The deck of cards contains 8 copies of the numbers 1 to 6, plus 8 Llama cards. Each round, the deck is shuffled, and each player is dealt 6 cards, and one card is placed face up as the starting card. Starting with the person who last played a card, they have 3 options for what they can do on their turn.
First, they can choose to play, which requires they play a card from their hand that either matches the card on top of the discard pile, or, is the next number in the sequence. Llama’s can be played on 6’s and 1’s can be played on Llama’s resetting the order.
Second, they can choose to pick up a card and add it to their hand. That’s it, turn is over.
Third, they can choose to quit the round. Doing so will allow the other players at the table to keep playing, but that player is no longer compelled to draw more cards. Once a player has quit the round, they cannot rejoin until a new round begins
And that’s it, players choose one of those three actions until either all players have chosen to quit, or, someone sheds all the cards from their hand. At that point, the scores are tallied.
The score of each round consists of each unique card left in your hand. Llamas are worth 10 points themselves, but if you have multiple llama’s in your hand at the end of the round, you only score 10 points. As an example, if the round ended, and you had one 4, two 5’s, and two llamas, your score would be 19 points. You keep your score by taking the black or white chips, white chips are worth 1 point and black chips are worth 10 points. The first player to meet or exceed 10 points triggers the end of the game, and the player with the lowest score at the end is the winner.
That’s right, points are bad in L.L.A.M.A. And if you’re the player who manages to get rid of all their cards during a round, you get an extra benefit of returning one of your point chips to the supply, reducing your score.
Review
Naming criticisms aside, L.L.A.M.A is a great little card game by the renowned Dr. Reiner Knizia. Now, my family is no stranger to games, having played dozens of games from Sagrada to Hardback. They’re enthusiastic and always ready to play whatever I happen to pull out of my bag.
L.L.A.M.A hits the table quickly. Deal 6 cards, on your turn either play, draw, or quit. You can only play cards that match or continue the existing card on the table, and points are bad. GO! What first appears as a too simple, too easy card game slowly opens up into an interesting and satisfying push your luck game. Actually playing the game is painless, The decisions available to you are generally fairly obvious, meaning you aren’t expending a lot of metal effort on the game. This lets the game fade into the background as you chat idly with your friends or family
What really sold this game for me would be when someone had a bad run, broke the 40 point barrier to trigger the end of the game, and my brother-in-law just scooped up the cards, said “Again”, and dealt out a new hand. It’s easy to just keep playing L.L.A.M.A while enjoying good company.
Don’t get me wrong, I love games that consume the entirety of my brain space, but not every situation calls for that kind of activity. L.L.A.M.A is a game that accommodates anything from 2 to 6 players, and manages to straddle the line of being too luck-dependant, and letting new players get absolutely crushed on their first turn. It feels good when you can empty your hands of cards, and winning feels satisfying, but if you get hosed and end up pulling in 21 points two hands in a row, you just blame the luck of the cards and deal them out again without any real hurt feelings.
L.L.A.M.A ebbs and flows, sometimes you’ll be stuck with lots of points in your hands, and you’ll struggle with the choice to play the 5 or the 6. If you play the 5, it might come back around as the 6, and you’ll be able to shed both cards out of your hand, but if you play a 5, and the next two players play a 6, then a Llama, you’re stuck with that 6 points in your hand. And if you just play the 6, will the round make it all the way back to the 5 before someone goes out? Similar decisions need to be made when choosing to draw or fold. Is 6 points an acceptable fold point? If you draw again, it might be a 10 point Llama card, and Bigfoot only has two cards left. In the end, the stakes are low, as if you manage to go out, flicking a chip back into the supply is eminently satisfying.
I love the frustrated grunt that pops up when someone doesn’t play in the way you want them to. I recognize that it can be frustrating when you play your 5 card, then every other player also plays a 5, leaving you right back where you started, and the reverse of waiting and waiting all round for the deck to get a 4, so you can play your 5 card, only to have the two players prior to you rush through that number. It’s also frustrating when everyone else folds, and you’re stranded with nothing to do. However, when everyone else folds and you happen to have a perfect run in your hand, slamming down card after card is immensely satisfying.
It’s easy to call L.L.A.M.A dumb or compare it to other games like UNO, but there’s a great joy to be found in a game that flows so smoothly that it stays out of the way. L.L.A.M.A facilitates easy conversation, pleasant visiting, and it’s just a simple joy to play. I foresee myself bringing L.L.A.M.A out to a lot more events where gaming may not be the main focus, such as family reunions, pub nights with friends, or double dates with a couple that I don’t know terribly well.
I don’t know what it is about L.L.A.M.A‘s scoring, but I don’t really care if I’m the winner. The only thing I really care about is not being the person who hits that 40 point threshold to end the game. The production of L.L.A.M.A is simple. Bright, colourful cards, and white and black plastic chips. Nothing else is needed. While the decisions in L.L.A.M.A aren’t fast and furious, and the luck can mean that you might lose, no matter what choices you make, it’s so quick and easy to play that a shrug of your shoulder and a gruff “again” gets you right back into the game. It’s unobtrusive and fades nicely into the background, which makes it a perfect choice for a laid back evening with family you don’t get to see terribly often.
The tagline for Portal Games is “Board games That Tell Stories”, and in my experience, they do a good job in delivering a story to tell during game night. Neuroshima Hex spins a tale of a standoff, each side getting stronger and stronger with each passing turn, until a climatic battle takes place and razes both sides. Robinson Crusoe is a story of a couple of shipwrecked survivors and how Mother Nature is just going to take their day from bad, to worse, and Stronghold 2nd Edition is basically Helms Deep in a box. Invaders are crashing against the stronghold walls, and if they get through, it’s game over for the defenders.
Otter has owned Stronghold 2nd Edition for years, and has failed to get it to the table until now. Between the dearth of 2 player game nights and the challenging rule book, it’s been a bit of a joke that he’s been enthusiastic to play it, but just hasn’t been able to actually carve out the time to do so.
Well, it’s finally happened. Otter and I gathered on a random Friday and finally broke out Stronghold. And here’s my story.
Leading up to game night, both Otter and I watched the 41-minute-long Watch it Played How to Play video, which was extremely helpful in getting us up and running. Otter had also printed out several additional player aids, a FAQ and Errata from the Esoteric Order of Gamers, which were helpful to reference while we were playing.
Rules for days, baby
So let’s set the stage. Stronghold, designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek and Published by Portal Games in 2015 is a 2 player game about invaders attempting to breach the stronghold walls. One player takes on the role of the invaders, orcs, goblins, and trolls as they flow onto the map and crash against the castle walls, while the other player takes on the role of the defenders. The Marksmen, soldiers, and Heroes attempt to shore up their defences and thwart the invaders plots.
I took on the role of the defenders, who start in a very good position. With marksmen and soldiers lining the walls, and nary a chink in their defence, things start out looking pretty good for the defenders.
The gameplay of Stronghold involves the invading army choosing actions from their row of cards, spending their resources to build siege weapons, deploy equipment, train specialists, preform rituals to cast spells, and finally, manoeuvre their troops into space. Each action they take may cost them units, representing taking a unit out of combat to play the role of support. For every action the invader takes, the defender gets some hourglass tokens that they can spend to shuffle their units around, train troops, forage defensive weapons like cannons and cauldrons, send scouts to sabotage the invader’s plans, and visit the cathedral to deploy tactics that will change the course of battle.
The invaders can’t even reach the walls until the end of the second turn, making the defender feel powerful for the first few rounds. Some invaders move in, and you fill them up with your arrows, felling 3 or 4 invading units. It’s pretty satisfying to have 5 invading units move into a rampart, only for 3 of them to immediately perish.
They need to be close to get to the walls, but that’s when they’re the most vulnerable
The ramparts serve as staging areas where the invaders muster their forces before making their push to the wall. Any invaders that push up to the wall are safe from arrows, but then engage in melee combat, where the defenders have an advantage. Each wall section provides a single point of persistent strength, along with some heroes serving as backup, and some towers providing further persistent strength. When melee combat is assessed, both sides tally up their strength value, and the difference between those strength values is called ‘the advantage’. The player who won the battle gets to remove units from the other side equal to the advantage. If the invaders’ advantage is more than the strength of the units on that wall segment, they breach the stronghold and win the game.
While the invaders have a lot to overcome, they only need to penetrate the wall at a single point to claim victory. The defenders have 7 wall sections to protect and if any of them fall, it’s game over. Almost every staging area can reach two separate wall sections, and the invaders have some significant movement available to them. A minor movement lets them move 5 units from every space, while only giving the defenders 3 time tokens.
As I said before, the first two rounds felt good as a defender. I erected a cannon and blasted a red troll out of the rampart. My arrows softened up the march of the invaders, knocking them down to two orcs in each spot. The Invaders had a card where if they had a green orc in every rampart, they got to spawn a single cube in every section, suddenly dumping another 9 units onto the field. In the 3rd round, a few melee combats happened, two orcs self detonated to blast two wall sections away, removing their persistent benefit, while on the other side of the castle, the marauders were dodging my pole towers and bringing the melee combat to a draw. A draw at the wall is dangerous for the defender, as the invaders have a much stronger ability to push more units up to the wall to top the scales of balance.
This battle could go either way
By the end of the 4th round, there were 3 potential breach points. Two ballistas and a catapult with a ritual token threatened my units, and at this point, any unit falling prior to melee combat would end me. Two of the three wall sections held, but the catapult and wall-less section gave away the victory to the invaders.
Stronghold 2nd Edition delivers on Portal Games moniker. We played with the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers soundtrack on in the background, and somehow, the music would swell during pivotal moments in the battle. Unfortunately, I failed to hold out to the dawn of the fifth day, and neglected to use the unearthly glare to swing the tide of battle.
The balance of Stronghold feels balanced on a knifes edge. If one player suffers more misses than average, while the other player does better, that’s what will swing the game. I would be very interested to see a heatmap of which wall sections break most often for the invaders, or even talk to someone who has played Stronghold in depth and pick their brains. I lost at the end of round 4, I imagine I would have lost in each of the subsequent rounds had my demise held off for a round.
So many things to do, so little time
Both sides of the conflict have several ways to thwart the other. Defends have traps, invaders can build bridges. Defenders have marksmen, invaders can build mantalets. Invaders have orders, the defender can thwart one plot. Siege weapons can be built, but the defender can sabotage the siege weapons. Both sides have lots of options available to them, which makes for great variety.
The tempo of the game is almost entirely controlled by the invaders. The defenders’ role is almost entirely reactionary. As the defender, there was a lot that I really wanted to do, but the amount of time I have to do things is dictated entirely by the attacker, and while building another cannon would be really nice, I need to prioritize a cauldron on a wall segment right now.
Otter and I will be playing Stronghold again soon, but with the roles reversed. I’m very curious to see if he’ll be successful in stopping the invading horde, or, if the defenders lose twice in a row, if we’ll broadly proclaim that role is simply the harder side to run.
