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.
Pendulum, by Travis P Jones, and published by Stonemaier Games in 2020, is a real time worker placement game. It was lauded in that it was the highest-rated prototype ever during a Stonemaier Games Design Day. Now, I don’t know what the scoring rubric is for one of those Design Days, but I’m a pretty big fan of Stonemaier Games prior products, like Viticulture and Scythe, and, I absolutely adore real-time games, so this should be a hit for me, right? Let’s find out!
How to Play
I’ll be upfront, teaching how to play Pendulum is a bit of a bear. As with any real-time game, all players need to know how to play the game from the outset. It’s quite difficult to stop and ask questions, lest that player and the rules teacher fall further behind. To compound on this problem, players who don’t want to fall behind may accidentally make a rules error that no one else catches. Because of the time pressure, each player is focused on what they want to do and less on what their opponents are doing. It’s for this reason, the rule book suggests playing the first round of the game in the “untimed mode”.
But I don’t listen to rule books. I throw my friends into the deep end. So here’s how the game plays. The main board has 3 sections: purple, green, and black, each section has two rows of actions. The rows are identical to each other, which makes the board look scarier than it actually is. Each row of actions consists of a golden framed top box and an arrow pointing down to a box immediately below it, with icons representing the benefit you get for going to that space. Many of the arrows will also have icons, representing the cost you need to pay when your workers flow from the top box to the bottom. Workers are always placed into the top box, and when appropriate, may be moved down into the bottom box to reap their rewards.
But when is appropriate? I’m glad you asked. Next to each row of actions is a timer that matches the colour of the section. You can place or remove workers from a row where there is no timer, but you cannot slide workers from the top box to the bottom box. When the timer runs out, anyone may flip the timer from one row to the other. Now those workers are ‘locked’, you cannot place or remove workers from a row where a timer exists. You can activate workers that are on a row with a timer, however, sliding them from their gilded top box into the bottom box and collect the benefits. But then there they must stay until the timer flips away to the other row.
The rounds are tracked by the purple timer. After the purple timer has been flipped for the third time, a counsel is called. No more timers may be flipped, but players are allowed to finish off the existing actions. Once all players are done, you proceed with the counsel phase.
In the counsel phase, players compare the number of votes they acquired over the course of the real-time round. The player with the most goes at the top of the privilege track, then discards all the votes they had gained over the round. Each player collects the rewards associated with their spot on the privilege track, which always includes a reward card offering either a one time benefit, or, a new card that goes into your hand. The board is reset, players discard provinces if they have more than 2 in any column, the council rewards board is cleared and refreshed, as are the province cards, and the achievement card. The purple timer tokens are placed back on the board, and flip all 3 timers to start the next round. After 4 rounds, the game is over!
The goal of Pendulum is to earn points in 3 different flavours (well, 4, but the silver one only has to be done once, so calm down). Each player has their own score track along the top of their board, and a single plastic piece in each row. As you accumulate points, you move the appropriate colour token along its track. You can only win if you’ve managed to get all of your point tokens into the brown square in the top right corner of your player board. If multiple players have achieved this feat, then you count up the total number of points to crown the Timeless Ruler
Review
So, other than knowing it was a Stonemaier Games product that featured a real time real-time element, I knew nothing going into this game. The front page of the rulebook sets the theme of Pendulum. “When the gods first created the world, they gave it no order. This was the Time of Chaos.” Then, one man caught the affection of the god of time and was granted a sliver of his power and became the Timeless King. Then POOF, the Timeless King vanished, leaving the nobles to vie for the title, leading us into the game of Pendulum. I know there’s a story here, but honestly, I don’t really care about it. I read it once, then moved straight into the mechanics. Unlike other games like Food Chain Magnate where the theme and the gameplay are so intrinsically linked, this is just kind of, colour on a cake.
The Pendulum board is incredibly intimidating to start with, but it becomes clear once the game starts to tick. You place your meeple in a square where the timer is not, then slide it down to collect the resources when the timer flips and ‘locks’ the meeple in that row. Like in another Stonemaier game, Viticulture, most of your workers are small, basic, and afraid of crowds, while your other worker is taller, spikier, and unrestricted in where they want to go. Most of the actions revolve around earning goods, which you can spend on various things, some of which will earn you points. Like most worker placement games, you generally can’t place your worker in the same spot as another worker, unless you’re placing the grande worker.
Smartly, each player has their own bank of resources. When you acquire and spend resources from your player board, you just push them off to the side. This is incredibly important as you won’t be constantly reaching back and forth for a central bank of goods, you’ll instead only be slapping hands when you and a neighbour want to place their basic meeple in the same location on the board. Unlike other real-time games, such as Galaxy Trucker, you can’t really hinder someone else by placing certain shared resources far away from them on the table.
It’s especially important because each of the 5 rounds of the game lasts around 9 minutes. In those 9 minutes there’s plenty of frenetic action on the board with meeples sliding down certain actions and getting picked up and relocated and timers flipping from one row to another. There’s definitely energy in Pendulum, no doubt about that.
The first round is always the hardest in any engine building game. You’ll spend several actions putting your meeples to work to earn a single resource. As the game progresses, you’ll start to solve those bottlenecks. By claiming provinces, you can reap more resources that you can then feed back into your engine to produce the goods you need. It feels great when you no longer need to use the bottom actions, but are actually generating a surplus of resources and your point markers start to crawl along the top of your board.
Speaking of those point markers, with so many cubes coming on and off your mat, it’s tough to not jostle your board and send your point markers askew. It’s one of the few production complaints that I have, I wish the player board was dual layered, or, that each of the player’s score track was a separate board. More than once in a rush to clear cubes off my board, I pulled the card stock roughly, losing time with the need to reset my markers.
A common complaint in real-time games has to do with cheating and not being able to review your neighbours work. In Pendulum, you can see where their workers are on the board at all time, but you kind of have to trust they’re spending their resources appropriately. If that’s an aspect of games that bothers you, nothing in Pendulum will change your mind.
Playing Pendulum gave heart a stutter in the best way. Not that it was particularly chaotic or stressful, but the feeling of making multiple computations at a rapid pace in real time is not for everyone. I love that feeling, it gives me such joy to keep all the plates spinning, and it makes my actions feel like they have consequence. It’s actually impressive just how good the real-time worker placement feels! The quick-thinking trade-off of locking your worker away to get multiple goods, or really pumping the shorter actions, the realization that your red score marker has capped out, while your blue score marker is still sitting way at the bottom, forcing you to pivot your strategy is simply delicious.
I really don’t know how often I’ll be going back to Pendulum. Other than knocking the point markers askew, I enjoyed my time with the game, but I also don’t feel like there’s much more to explore. Other than some slightly asymmetric player powers, there doesn’t feel to be much more to discover in Pendulum. Sure, I could challenge myself to complete a game with each character, or set my own goals, like finishing the game with the highest score possible. My main group feels similarly, now that we’ve experienced the game, I don’t think many will be requesting to play it again (especially when Bear has quite an aversion to real time games). If anyone were to express an iota of interest, I wouldn’t hesitate to bring Pendulum back to the table.
Full Disclosure – A copy of HerStory was provided by Underdog Games for review purposes
Introduction
March is Women’s History Month, and to celebrate both the month, and the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote in the USA), Underdog Games is selling their recently released board game HerStory, for $19.19 (US only, sorry fellow non-Americans).
I don’t know if it’s just me, but as soon as a game is billed as educational doubts creep into my mind. I blame the poorly made educational games I played as a kid in the mid 90’s (I have the same gut reaction to movie tie-in games too). HerStory is educational in that all the cards represent real women throughout history, and includes a small paragraph of what makes them notable.
How to Play
HerStory, designed by Nick Bently, Emerson Matsuuchi, and Danielle Reynolds is a 2 – 5 player set collection and card drafting game. In HerStory, players are authors and spend their turns researching, drafting, and completing chapters of a book chronicling the stories of remarkable women of History
On your turn, you take one of the three actions. When you research, you take a token depicting aspects of your research (reading, thinking, interviewing, and searching) from the main board and place it into your supply. When drafting a chapter of your book, you take a chapter card from the main board, and slot it into one of the two open spaces on your desk, reserving it for yourself, and scoring 2 points. The final action in the game is to complete a chapter, where you select a chapter card, either one you reserved previously, or, from the main board, and discard research tokens to fulfill the requirements of the chapter. Then you slot the completed chapter onto it’s space on your board and score the points in the top left corner (and earning 3 bonus points if you managed to fulfill the recipe exactly). Many characters have persistent research tokens that you can now use to finish future chapters.
HerStory ends when someone completes their 8th chapter. Players finish the round, ensuring that all players had an equal number of turns, then the player with the highest score is the winner.
Review
It’s been a long time since a “how to play” section was pretty much a single paragraph. HerStory defies expectations. The box is much larger than necessary, but the cover is striking. My partner was actually the one to receive the package from the courier, and she remarked that she loved HerStory‘s cover. It was the kind of game that if she saw it on a shelf at a store, she would stop in her tracks and pick it up.
The cover depicts 16 of the 120 women featured in the game, with wonderful portrait illustrations by Eunice Adeyi and Cristina Aguirre. Some gold foil on the cover surrounding the title is striking. Opening the box, the first thing I saw was an envelope with some special gifts. Postcards, bookmarks, and stickers to keep these influential women prominent in our lives. The game itself is composed of a monogrammed bag of thick tokens, a large, stitched edge neoprene mat to serve as the main board, 5 chunky pushpin score markers, and 120 large sized cards, each one depicting an illustration of a different woman on one side, and a short blub of who they were and what makes them notable on the back.
No expense was spared in this production. The cards and the rule book have a luxury linen finish, the cardboard chits are very thick and feel sturdy in your fingers. I’m not a fan of the faux leather monogrammed bag, I’ve never liked the way faux leather feels on my fingers, but it’s sized correctly; there isn’t a lot of empty space in that bag. The plastic insert is well-designed, in that it was successful as keeping all the components in their appropriate wells, even when the box is stored on its side, a feat not all game inserts manage to achieve.
I will say the box for HerStory is much bigger than necessary, each of the card wells in the insert has space for hundreds of more cards. I suspect this extra space is so Underdog Games can release expansion packs, highlighting even more women in the future. Assuming they continue to support this game in the future, the box might fill up, but at the time of this writing, it’s a bit bare. Some part of me always wants a game box to be as small as possible, but I can’t deny that HerStory is striking, and part of that comes from the full size box demanding space on the shelf, and showcasing its gorgeous illustrations.
I like the theme of writing a novel about women in history, having each player spend several turns researching to acquire the knowledge to write a chapter feels clever. Taking tokens that represent interviewing, reading, and thinking about each of the figures feels important, in that it’s important to put in the proper research when writing about famous people, especially in a world rife with misinformation. When you finish the game and collect all your chapters together behind the book cover that is on the back of your player aid, you feel like you’re holding something you’ve built. It seems a bit silly in that they’re only the cards you collected, but they represent the effort you spent on researching and learning about each figure. The rulebook suggests that at the end of the game, each player selects one of their cards, and reads the biography to the table.
The core gameplay loop is incredibly simple. You’re either ‘researching’ to take a token, or, spending those tokens to complete a card. There’s not a lot of space for strategic depth here, once you’ve played through a handful of turns, you’ll have tried everything available to you. From that point on, it’s just repeating the same core loop and trying to optimize based on the cards that are available to you. Some cards will offer powers that you can use all game, like persistent research icons, while others give you benefits throughout the game (like Wangari Maathai, who earns you extra points for completing lower valued chapters), and others are simply high valued cards, like the 8 point powerhouse that is Joyce Chen.
Many of the cards have special abilities, but the ones I wish I saw more of were the powers that offer persistent research symbols. In one game I got 2 different persistent benefits cards, then I was able to start completing cards by only spending a single token, leaving my opponents in the dust. My 8 cards to their 5 felt like a momentum that couldn’t be overcome. The variety of the cards is deep, in that there are 120 cards and in a 2 player game you’ll only see around 25 cards per game. I kind of wish that every card offered a single persistent benefit in addition to their text power, as that would help give the feeling of momentum as the game wears on. At the start of the game, spending 3 or 4 turns just getting tokens, then another turn to earn a single card is fine, then at the end of the game being able to complete chapters with a single token felt great, and I wish all players could experience that satisfaction.
Some will be disappointed with HerStory because of just how simple it is to play. But I think its simplicity is a strength, in that HerStory is incredibly accessible. Anyone can play this game, and it’s the kind of game that many people should play. The turns are fast and smooth, downtime is minimal, the components feel nice to hold. More importantly, it’s great for highlighting and teaching about influential women throughout history. Showcasing the great things these women have accomplished despite the barriers of being a woman is inspirational, and the kind of product that I want in my house. Frequently I would complete a chapter, place the card on my player board, then think to myself “Who even is Golda Meir?” I liked having the option to just turn the card over to discover what made her notable (She was the first and, so far, only female Prime Minister of Israel).
In conclusion, I want you to ask yourself, “what is the purpose of this game for me?” If you’re looking for a complex board game with lots of interlocking mechanisms, and a deep strategic well to plumb, HerStory isn’t going to fulfill that need for you. If you’re looking for an attractive, easy to play game full of inspirational figures that will simultaneously provide you with an activity to engage with, and teach you about some of the accomplishments of women throughout history, then I can’t recommend HerStory enough. I want my little girl growing up knowing there’s nothing she can’t do, and exposing her to the stories of strong, female role models is a great way to start.
A copy of Zaberias was provided by the designer for review purposes
Zaberias is the kind of game I wished I had as a kid. It presents itself as a fairly light tactical skirmish game where you throw yourself against an opponent. Considering just how much Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones I was playing on my GameBoy Advance back in the day, I’m sure 12-year-old Alex would have loved to get my hands on this game.
How to play
In Zaberias, each player takes control of one of the four factions, and places their map adjacent to the other players, then erects a single wooden building in the far corner of their map. The map has slots that allow you to stand the towers in, creating a nice 3D effect. The maps are identical in layout, the asymmetry from the factions comes from the units you can deploy.
At the start of the game, you’ll have 5 coins available to you. You can take as many actions as you want, and spend as many coins as you want to deploy units and upgrade cities, but you’ll only recover gold at the start of your turn based on the cities and number of gold mines you collect.
On your turn you can summon units to cities, upgrade cities, and activate the units that are on the board. Each city can summon creatures up to their level (a wood city can only summon the first tier wood creatures, while a gold city can summon any creature). Pay the coin cost on the back of the unit and place it in the same square as the city. If you want to upgrade a city, pay the cost of the new tier of city and replace the old city with one of the higher level. Each unit can only be activated once per turn, and activating a unit means moving and attacking (or attacking and then moving). Each unit has a movement value that lets them move orthogonally throughout the map, or, diagonally if they’re following a road.
Attacking has you comparing each of the units base ‘muscle value’, then rolling a number of dice to modify that value. The unit with the lower value at the end of the combat loses, and is removed from the board. Units can attack together to gang up on a bigger unit, should multiple friendly units be in range, but each unit can still only attack once.
The goal of Zaberias is to be the last tribe standing. You do this by eliminating your opponent’s units and taking over their castles. Once a player has no more units or castles on the board, they’re out of the game.
Review
Zaberias is a weird product. The current edition of the game is 4 triple layered cardboard squares, with a foam inset to hold the dice. It doesn’t come with a box or a paper rulebook, just, these four self-contained tribes in a bubble mailer. It might be a nitpick, but Zaberias stands out like a sore thumb amongst the boxes on my board game shelf. Each unit and tower is snuggly set in the cardboard, which can sometimes present a struggle for getting the pieces you want out. I do wonder what kind of longevity this product has, after only 3 times playing, a few of the cardboard piece were starting to bend at the point where you pry them out of their cardboard cage.
Learning how to play Zaberias is a struggle. The rulebook and FAQ do have all the answers to the questions that came up during game play, but finding those answers was surprisingly difficult. There are also a lot of edge case rules that make teaching the game to a newcomer, difficult. It’s the kind of game where if you’ve played it a lot, everything will feel second nature and obvious, but it’s hard to cover all the nuance in your first game. Rules like “units can only move orthogonally. Except on roads.” and “Ranged units can only attack orthogonally. Except on roads.” or “If you lose a combat, that unit is removed from the board. Except if you’re ranged, then nothing happens.” and “Units can only attack once per turn, but if you tie during an attack, you can choose to attack again, or, stand down.” Little exceptions to rules make the game harder to learn than it should be.
Most of the units have a special ability, that gives each of the races an asymmetric advantage, but their abilities are all listed on the back of the token. It’s really annoying to have to pick up each token and remind yourself of what each one can do. Again, if you’ve played Zaberias a lot, and you’re familiar with all the units, it’s not a problem. But for me, I got frustrated when I forgot to use a unit’s special ability, or when a unit could do something surprising, like keep defeated units under their token to get a +1 in their next combat, especially when I had plans to re-summon that unit in the next round.
I can’t recommend playing Zaberias at more than two players. It’s easy to get ganged up on, to have one player wipe out your defences, then another swoop in and take your castle. The player who waits until two others fight it out, then pick off the remaining units, is going to be in the best position. It feels like the game hinges on a few key battles, then when one player gets an advange over the other, it’s very hard to make a comeback, which in a 2 player game, is fine, as it’s over fairly quickly. But if you’ve been reduced to a single coin and a wooden tower in a 4 player game, you’re just waiting for someone to make the effort to come over to your corner of the board and finish you off. Not a fun experience. One nice thing about playing exclusively at 2 players is the ability to swap our races between each game.
Playing Zaberias was more fun than I expected it to be. Perhaps I’m jaded, but when I saw the emblems on the cover of each race stating “#1 best educational game for Kids 6+!”, and “Guaranteed fun!” I got a sinking feeling in my gut. You shouldn’t have to advertise that your game is going to be fun, that’s the point of the product! But overall, it’s a fairly good system. You move your units, control spaces on the board, and roll dice to resolve combats. This does seem like the kind of game that kids could get really into. A gateway into bigger skirmish games, like Warhammer and Battletech. I’m sure if I had Zaberias as a kid, I would have forced my mom to play with me a lot, it evokes the same feelings as the video games I was obsessed with at the time (the aforementioned Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem series).
Overall, I can tell that a lot of time, effort, thought, and love has gone into designing Zaberias. It seems like the kind of product that the designer has tinkered with over the years as his loved ones grew older. On the cover, it states that Zaberias was 15 years in the making. Looking at past iterations of the product, it looks like this 3rd edition has been scaled back, simplified and refined. I still think Zaberias could do with a bit more refining, sand off some of the rougher corner cases to make it easier for newcomers to approach, but doing so could sacrifice some of the depth, which begs the question, who is Zaberias for? I think Zaberias is a great gateway into bigger skirmish games and could do with a bit more refining. Kids will love it, and adults love playing with their kids. If you don’t have a kid in your life, I don’t think Zaberias will see much repeat play with adults, especially with those who are already inclined to explore bigger and more complex skirmish games that are already on the market.
Even if I have concerns about the production. I know 12-year-old me would have had a blast playing Zaberias. It might big a hit for you, or, it might just be the taste of tactical warfare that you needed to start looking at other skirmish games more seriously. On the other hand, if you don’t like direct combat and conquest games, Zaberias isn’t going to change your mind.
Full Disclosure: Cephalofair Games has provided me with a review copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion
Introduction
I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Gloomhaven. Back in 2017 when I was only a year or two into playing board games, and didn’t have a regular friend group. I was attending a weekly open gaming event when I was asked if I was interested in joining a Gloomhaven campaign. A fellow who I’ll call Sloth had just received his Kickstarter copy of Gloomhaven, but had no one to play it with. Two others, Polar Bear and Owl, were also invited to join.
Cut to a week later, we gathered at Polar Bear’s house, and Sloth dropped the massive box of Gloomhaven on the table. Sloth had half-watched a rules video, and Polar Bear had partially read the rulebook, but none of us had a good gasp on how to play this behemoth. I poured over the rulebook and slowly cobbled everything together.
How to Play
For those who haven’t played Gloomhaven, here’s the rundown. Contained in the box is 21 pounds of cardboard. No joke. To start the game, each player will choose one of the 6 asymmetric starting classes. Gloomhaven is a campaign game with over 90 missions to explore. As you make choices in the narrative, you’ll unlock new locations and missions to undertake, all guided by a thick storybook. Each mission will tell you how to set the map up, generally combining a series of tiles to form the play area, and which enemies you’ll need for this mission. After a brief interlude for the story, the actual gameplay begins.
On each turn, players secretly choose two of the cards from their hand of cards to play during the round. Every card has a number in the centre that dictates your initiative value, which will dictate the order in which you’ll be able to take your turn. Gloomhaven is a cooperative game, and as such, you’re encouraged to collaborate with your teammates on achieving your goals. You can’t talk specifics, but you can say things like “I’m going to move kind of fast, and I can take out these two guys over here.” or “I’ll be sluggish, but I’m beelining for the treasure in the corner.”
Once all players have selected two cards, they reveal their cards and determine the player order. Each monster has a deck of tactics cards that will dictate and modify that monster’s skills and attacks for the round, one of those cards gets flipped up, and the monster’s initiative gets added into the mix. Then, in player order, everyone takes their turns.
Every player card in Gloomhaven has two halves to it, a top side and a bottom side. From the two cards you chose, you can use the top of one of the cards, and the bottom of the other card. You are not allowed to use two top side actions, nor can you use two bottom side actions. The top side of the cards generally have to do with attacking, while the bottom side generally deals with moving, but there are certainly exceptions to that rule.
One of the mechanics of the game is called ‘burning’ your cards. As you play cards, you place them into your discard pile. At the start of the round you can choose to either do a short rest, or a long rest. The short rest has you pick up all your discarded cards, randomly select one to be ‘burned’, then adding the rest of the cards back into your hand. When a card is burned, it’s placed off to the side, removed for the rest of the scenario. A long rest has you skip the entire action round, but allows you to heal 2 health, and you get to manually select a card to burn. If you run out of cards or health, you become exhausted and are out of the scenario. Many of your most powerful actions also force you to burn the card instead of placing it in the discard pile. Such is the price of power.
So what are you really trying to do here? Gloomhaven is a combat focused game, generally your goal will either be to route the enemy, or, reach a certain location on the map. Another wrinkle to the combat is that every attack gets modified by flipping a card from the attacking characters’ modification deck. This can do nothing, add or subtract one or two points of damage, or excitingly, double the damage, or disappointingly, null the damage entirely. But that’s the bare basics of the game, play cards 2 at a time, and try and achieve the objective set out in the start of each scenario.
Now don’t get me wrong, Gloomhaven is a complex game, with 14 conditions and status effects that can be inflicted, 6 elements that wax and wane, 28 different icons and 12 different types of cards available, the cognitive load that Gloomhaven presents can be absolutely brutal. Remembering every detail and how all the mechanics mesh together is no small feat. It’s very likely that you’ll get some amount of rules wrong, and I highly recommend you have someone who is very familiar with the game to lead you through your first couple missions.
My Experience
By the time Polar Bear, Owl, Sloth, and I chose to stop playing Gloomhaven, we had met weekly for 3 months. 12 seperate plays of Gloomhaven at 4 players each time, and I was fairly bitter about my overall experience. I was the one ‘running’ the game, administering all the enemies and their focuses, reminding everyone what each of the status effects do, updating the element board, adding and removing status chits from enemies, everything. The only part that I wasn’t involved with was setting up the game, as the others would have the scenario mostly set up before I arrived.
In addition to the mental load of running the game, I found myself frustrated with the other players. Owl had terrible analysis paralysis, with long stretches of time when they would just be staring at their hand of cards, Sloth was willing to burn their cards without discrimination then complain when they were exhausted out of the scenario, and Polar Bear would run by a mass of enemies to loot a chest, leaving the others to suffer their fate of getting pummled by the monsters. At the end of the 2 months, we had failed every first attempt at a mission, but succeeded in each subsequent attempt. Each play was in excess of 3 hours, and I just wasn’t having fun with Gloomhaven.
I felt frustrated in that as the brute, I wasn’t gaining experience when slaying enemies. I’d cleave down the monsters, only to have the Mindthief zip in and loot all the gold. Furthermore, I was jealous in that my friends were scooping up the gold and gaining experience at the same time, while I felt like I was taking all the hits and killing multiple enemies only to get a single exp point. I didn’t like that all my best cards also burned them, punishing me for doing the big cool action. Honestly, a big part of my frustrations came from my friends not supporting each other and choosing gold and exp the moment they felt we might not win a scenario. Maybe it was too much game for us and where we were in our gaming lives. I can’t speak for them, but I suspect they, too, were frustrated, and choosing to chase gold and exp at least gave them a short term goal that they could achieve. I left the group, and looking at the gameplay records for my friends, they did not continue their adventure after I left.
Late last year, Bigfoot invited me to revisit Gloomhaven. It was one of his favourite games, and he felt my incoherent ramblings weren’t giving the game a fair shake. So I bought the game on Steam, and we set off on another adventure. We played for 90 minutes, failing the first scenario to some ludicrously bad luck, but succeeded in the next missions. I slept on my feelings, but chose to refund the game the next day. Having a computer manage everything did help me enjoy the game more, but it highlighted one aspect that I didn’t like so much, and that’s the ‘burning cards’ mechanic. I was really annoyed that all my best and coolest abilities also meant burning the card out of my hand. It felt like I was being punished for doing the cool action, and that’s not what I want in a dungeon crawler.
Tied to that burning card mechanism, the missions didn’t give players much time to explore. There’s a treasure chest in the corner of the room, you need to make a concerted effort to do so. I felt punished for exploring, and considering how much I love discovery, choosing to move past the chest to win the scenario was utterly painful.
Epic Games gave Gloomhaven away for free in November 2021, and I picked it up there, but left it unplayed. Cephlophair Games recently sent me a copy of Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion to review, and following a very successful first 2 missions, I couldn’t get Gloomhaven out of my head! I recently started the digital game up, and started playing two characters on my own, the Craigheart and the Brute. I was turned off at first, with the first mission feeling pretty hard, but overcoming the challenge felt good. I liked controlling two characters, having a unified strategy helped me cover my weaknesses, and I didn’t really have to worry of someone doing something that I didn’t want them to do. Considering I had lambasted Gloomhaven for years, I had to swallow my pride and admit that Gloomhaven was a pretty good game.
Perhaps part of my problem has to do with framing. I saw Gloomhaven as a dungeon crawling game, a genre of game that generally has you be a big damn hero, popping off cool abilities and scooping up treasure. In reality, it’s much closer to something like XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics. A resource management battler, a risk assessment adventure. Each choice you make has the chance to go horribly awry, so you better have some backup plans. With that framing in mind, I begin to appreciate Gloomhaven more. It’s a tight, tough game, the joy and elation that comes from overcoming a seemingly impossible challenge. How each character synergies with themselves and with the other characters is immensely satisfying.
I’ve played a further 8 hours of Gloomhaven, and I’m starting to feel like I’m in an abusive relationship. When times are tough, they’re brutal. I had to replay a single mission 4 times because I kept running into an enemy that would shield for 2, then heal themselves for 4. I couldn’t generate enough damage to penetrate their shield and drain their 8 health, and when I had a narrow moment of opportunity to kill them, I’d pull a null. One mission in particular saw me pull 4 nulls between my two characters, leaving me to wallow in despair. But when I finally completed it, I was elated. When the times are good, they’re great.
I’m going to continue to play Gloomhaven. I’m excited to return and explore the character combos. I’ve spun up a 3rd character, a Spellweaver to help with some of the ranged damage that I needed assistance with. I’ve joined the Gloomhaven subreddit and have spent more time thinking about Gloomhaven in the past three weeks than I have in the past three years. It’s a brilliant game, a carefully crafted puzzle, and an immense challenge and achievement. It might not be for you, and that’s okay! Gloomhaven absolutely isn’t for everyone, but if you can find the joy in the 21 pounds of cardboard that comes in this massive red box, There’s enough game there to last you for years.
