By Peter Ruth II

Friends, I’ve decided that I’ve been remiss in not sharing with you the vast pool of knowledge that I’ve learned over the years regarding tabletop miniatures gaming, and so this is the first of many articles that will pass on some of the laborious research I’ve carved out of the Internet. The tag will be “Miniatures Gaming 101″ and I’ll be putting articles ranging from figure sources, game rules, painting tip sites, terrain building help, the best books to buy, and all manner of things relating to all things miniature. I’m not a great figure painter, though I can hold my own, but I am a very capable terrain builder, so I’ll likely share some of my projects with you fine folks as well. So, let’s begin with a great source of material to quickly and cheaply get a table going for a skirmish: Pegasus Hobbies (PegasusHobbies.net).

There was a time, so long ago, that I was playing Battletech, Mage Knight, and all manner of miniature game on paper mats. Yes, they do serve a purpose, but why would you want to if you didn’t have to, and further, if it wasn’t prohibitively expensive? It’s because I didn’t know just how many miniatures companies are out there, nor did I know just how inexpensive miniatures terrain can be if you know where to look. Well, I was at a game store just before I got sick a year and a half ago, and I saw this wonderful, detailed church sitting on a Warhammer table. After inquiring, it turns out that the guy spent all of two hours painting and assembling it, and the amazing part, he spent just over twenty dollars on it.

I immediately got online and found that this company’s products are both inexpensive and ubiquitous, and so I jumped in with both feet and got both a Gothic City Ruins and the same church set that I had seen at the store. As soon as I got it home I realized just how easy it was going to be to turn the box into what would be the ruins of the Esoteric Order of Dagon church, an ancient, decaying factory, the burned-out hulk of an old apartment building, and so many other terrain features. Within an hour I had glued it and assembled it, and because I tend to overthink things, three hours later I had the whole thing primered, painted, blackwashed, and three-color dry-brushed. It is simply amazing how wonderful these things look once you’ve got them painted.

I’m never one to do something half-assed, so I took it further once I’d had it for a year and really got interested in making beautiful landscapes to play on, so I then based the entire set, flocked it (including adding moss to the model), and put another ten dollar Pegaus set of rubble in the center to create the illusion that the top of the building had fallen in long ago. In all, it looks just like I hoped it would, and I’m out maybe a total of 6 hours time and forty bucks in materials. That said, it was very nice looking with a simple blackwash/drybrush treatment, and the flexibility of the sets are such that if you were to buy two, you could present them on the table as four sides of the same ruined building.

The second set I got was, as I noted, the church itself. The beauty of these sets is that you can make them in a great many configurations, and so I made mine a little non-standard, since I’m a pretty non-standard individual myself. I ended up making it an “evil church”, airbrushing the entire thing flat black and following with a grey drybrush treatment. I also airbrushed ~flame light~ on and around the lanterns but it didn’t turn out as well as I liked. It’s still got some work to go, a year later or so, but it’s been good enough for my table so I haven’t put effort into it to get it to what I consider “quality work”.

About a month ago I downloaded and printed the free rules for “The Skank Game”, otherwise known as Warlords of the Wasteland 2085, which is a post-apocalyptic skirmish game that includes vehicles and very light RPG elements. I was looking for a Fallout-esque game and therefore I needed to have some post-apocalyptic game pieces. Well, a forum member at Fortress:AT was talking about Pegasus’ Syberclicks terrain, which is the Warhammer 40K equivalent of the Hexagon terrain (shown left), so I bought both the large and small packs, which cost a total of $32.00. Well, let me tell you, it’s really quite modular in that you can build virtually anything you can imagine, much like Lego products, but with a very “hodge-podge”, scavenged feel to the buildings. As usual, I couldn’t follow the directions as listed, so with the small set I made something not remotely resembling the shown product, which integrated into the walled wasteland outpost I

created using the large set. The wife likes it, and she’s a tough customer to please, so I’m content. It’s very lightweight, so I think it really will need to have a base on it to sturdy it up. It snaps together with these clips that I believe were sent by the Devil himself, because after 2 hours of modelling, my fingers were LITERALLY bleeding. They’re a real bitch to assemble, no doubt, but it’s worth it. As you can see from the photo of the frames, there’s a bazillion little rippy bits and each one is sharp as a razor, even after you’ve removed them from the frame. The clips come in six styles, from 90 degrees to multi-angle three-way, and there’s a lot of flexibility in what you can do. Again, these things bite into your hand like a spur when you assemble the buildings, so be advised that you will not get out of this without some serious finger damage. I’d argue that it’s worth it.

I spray painted the assembly after I glued it, and while you don’t need to glue it, I wanted this to be a permanent structure so I used some CA and with a fine needle tip, dispensed a small drop at each joint and let the capillary action draw it into the connector. It’s very durable now, and I left several joints unglued so that I can break it into two pieces for storage. I’ll base it using some small lengths of plasticard epoxied to the bottom and flocked with sand. I may even use some modelling clay or Sculpey to create small berms along the base to make it look as if the structure has been there a while.  What I was going for, in all honesty, is something like a scaled-down version of the”juice” refinery in The Road Warrior. This photo shows what I built, and in retrospect, I really should’ve primed it, but the Rustoleum Hammered Copper spray paint usually sticks to pretty much anything. This is just the first coat, and only sprayed from top down. I ran out, so off to the store I go after work for another to finish the job. Once I’ve got it coated, I’ll airbrush several layers of brown, grey, red, orange, and yellow on it to create a very rusty metal look, then I may or may not hand-paint some “hot spots” of dripping rust effect.

Along with the Hexagon stuff I also got the Pegasus Technobridge, which runs $15.00, and will save me a ton of time having to scratch build it out of Plasticard and balsa. It’s the same as the church stuff, very simple to construct and looks great right out of the box, although I’ll be painting it, probably to match the outpost, and then putting some sand on it here and there to give it a more realistic look.

Now, Pegasus also creates some pre-painted stuff as well. For fantasy, or even some early American settings, you can buy a lot of small buildings that come ready-to-play. These are made of a hard stone material, perhaps even dental stone, so they’re really rather heavy for their size compared to the Gothic stuff. This Small Stone Cottage cost me $13.00 and its larger brother cost me maybe five dollars more. They’re a single, solid cast piece, so these are really only good to create the feel of a village rather than actually allow you to have door-to-door fighting. I’ve used these for Strange Aeons, and they fit in passably with my 1920′s period pieces fairly well. It beats having to build and paint a Plasticville O-scale building, which I’ll get into in a another Miniatures Gaming 101 article, when all you want is a prop piece to sit on the table as a thematic line-of-sight blocker.

In conclusion, you can get a lot of really great terrain, and I mean an entire city block’s worth, for around a hundred dollars with Pegasus, and the stuff is so easy to assemble, aside from the Hexagon finger-scourge stuff, that it’s a no-brainer. My only complaint with any of it is that they have only a few “lines” to choose from. I’d love if they moved into doing something like Plasticville, but in different time periods. It would certainly save me a lot of time in sourcing parts to kit-bash into what I want. Hope you enjoyed the article, and there’s much more to come.

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By Paco Garcia Jaen

This week in my gaming group there were two copies of Z-Man Terra Mystica and the 8 of us wanted to play it. Well, I wasn’t mad about playing it, but I’m happy to play anything, so I thought “what the heck… let’s play an Euro”.

The game is a competitive euro. During the game, you take control of specific hexagonal areas of the game. Each player has a terrain they can use for free (marshes, mountains, deserts, etc) and the objective of the game is to terraform the adjacent terrains so you can build enough buildings to gather enough points to build cities, which give you advantages. Everything you do gives you victory points and at the end… well, you know the rest.

First impressions of the game were very good. The board looks lovely, the tokens are think and colourful. The character sheets are on the thin side, but the do the job nicely and didn’t bend when probed. The meeples are the standard wooden meeples. Some are little men, and some are buildings. There are 6 types of buildings, houses, cathedrals, temples and some I can’t remember. Although the shape of the wooden tokens is distinctive enough that you can’t mistake them from each other, they not all reflect what they’re meant to be. There is nothing about the temple token that tells is a temple; it’s just a bigger cylinder. Still.. they’re very easily recognisable.

Also the character/player sheets are well designed. It is very easy to see what terrains you can control and the cost of terraforming terrains that are too far from your range. Also what buildings you can build, the resources you get every round, the cost of upgrade… Very, very good.

The only thing I didn’t take a look at was the rules book. Dave explaining the rules to the three of us (bless him!) and didn’t have the chance or, to be honest, the need.

The gameplay is complex. Players take turns to do one action at a time. Terraforming, building, upgrading, placing… whatever they want, until they run out of the resources needed to carry out any action. At that moment, the player must pass. The first player in the round to pass takes the first player token for the next round.

Resources come in the shape of meeples (priests) buildling materials, gold or magic/mana points. Yes, there is a sort of magic system by which you can distribute a number of magic tokens between three areas. That allows you to do “something” in your turn, but stops you from doing it all in one go to overpower the game. A bit complicated…

There is also another board where you can put meeples on and get more advantages, but I must admit I didn’t really understand it. I used it just for the sake of it when I had some meeples I didn’t know what to do with (hey! I learned the game after a long day at work with a headache… And Dave at the table…) and it didn’t impede my participation in the game. Having said that, it is a pretty important part of the game to get victory points and understanding it could be the difference between winning or losing.

The game can take around a couple of hours to play and, sorry to say, it’s not a good game for people with analysis paralysis. It can easily drag on. And on.

That also translate in the fact that there is a fair bit to do in the game and a fair number of creating strategies to get one to victory, though, so this game has a fair bit of replayability.

There is no doubt that the game is a terrific one. Complex and yet easy to get to grips with, it has a lot to offer. But it is not for me.

I felt it’s a bit overworked and it has aspects that are unbalanced. The different races are unbalanced and depending on what terrain you start you’ll have it easier or more difficult. Player interaction is reduced to stopping people from expanding their land and giving them resources when you upgrade buildings that are adjacent to other players. In fact if the players started to terraform and develop cities in opposite sides of the board, player interaction would probably be reduced to nothing.

The theme is also very much pasted on top of the rules. Although it’s a medieval/magic sort of environment, it could have been a science-fiction or a proper medieval or current day theme and it would have worked just the same.

As much as I am not mad about this game, I have to admit, if you like euros, you certainly should get it. The production values are what you would expect from Z-Man so the money you pay is worth it.

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By Peter Ruth II

I’d heard about Settlers of Catan a hundred billion times, at least, as it’s widely called “The Fazzer Of Ze Euroz Gaming”, and I’ve heard it panned by Ameritrash folks as a gaming atrocity. Although not as widely hated, at least publicly, as renaissance farming or weenie trading games, it has been the subject of scorn and ridicule. “It doesn’t have a body count”, they said. “It doesn’t have much player interaction”, the said.

Well, don’t mind the bollocks, because “they” are invariably full of crap.

I had played Settlers of Catan all of one time up until 2 weeks ago, and it was a learning game four years ago at GenCon, with some guys I had never met. Me, being my usual self, just saw there were three guys about to play, so I sat down, and said, “What color am I?” One of them said, “Mediterranean tan?” and I figured I was at the right table. They graciously allowed me to play, although none of them had played, and by the time we were done, 2 and a half hours later, I realized that not only was I at the wrong table, but I was playing the wrong game. They bad mouthed the game the whole time, I later learned that we were playing it wrong , and I had subconsciously written off the game as another crappy Euro game. “How could it be so popular?” was ringing in my ears. So, I went back to playing games where people get blown up, cleaved in half by energy weapons, or where demons and zombies roam freely.

Fast forward to three weeks ago, when I decided to trade for a copy of Settlers as a gift for my bestie’s wife, the one staunch proponent of all things Euro and Tikal in my little gaming legion. Now, since I always get screwed into being the game teacher, I figured I had better learn the game before I tried to teach it, so I bought in on my iPad. What a horrendous mistake that was. “Why, pray tell is that, Mr. A Pimp Named Slickback?” you might ask? First, no need for the “Mr.”, and the reason it was a mistake is that after purchasing the game, it is the only game I’ve played on my iPad since. I mean, we’re talking addiction-level playtime, in excess of 80 hours over the last 2 weeks alone. Worse still, since I’ve learned it I’ve requested it at every game night, multiple times. Holy Mother of God, what a great game. I’m desperately hooked at this point. I’m not saying that I’d suck your dick for a sheep, but I’m not saying it’s out of the realm of possibility.

Now, the iPad game is fast, and fun, but only in a limited “I kicked the AI’s ass” kind of way. The real fun is not in the winning, but rather in convincing your friends that they ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THAT GRAIN, and they should pay you one of each other commodity for it. It’s about the sale; the small victories along the way. It’s about the other players looking over at the person you just took for everything but their underwear, with that, “Say what, bitch? You just gave him WHAT, for WHAT?” look of amazement and disbelieving scrutiny. It’s about the “take that” moment when you put a settlement along an enemy’s road, thereby crushing their hopes of that quick 2 point score they’ve been trying to earn over the last ten turns. Anyone that says Settlers of Catan has little direct player interaction is clearly either not playing it right, or a jizznozzle.

The game’s rules are very simple, which is a boon if you’re the game teacher, and the game is actually quite simple to understand. You get commodities, you trade commodities, and you build things to earn points. On its face, you’d think that there wasn’t much there, but once you really understand it, every single turn has agonizing decisions that will affect the balance of power. This doesn’t even begin to address the fact that there’s a wild card in play, the “robber”, who is the Catan equivalent of a thermonuclear attack. You drop that bastard on a tile that has an opponent’s building adjacent to it, and you can not only steal that person’s crap, if they have too many cards, they lose half their cards.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the robber poisons the land like a cloud of radioactive fallout, so that the region doesn’t produce anything, which is the icing on the uranium cake. Best of all, he stays there until someone else rolls a seven to move him, or someone has a card that allows him to be moved. It’s brutal beyond compare. The look of consternation and hate that follows such an attack is well worth the price of admission alone. Do it to the same player twice, consecutively, or if several players do it to the same player consecutively, and it is wholly plausible that their face will crack open and hatch a Velociraptor, who will subsequently devour your gizzards in a blinding sea of blood and unabated rage. Like I said, it’s a brilliant game.

If there is one weakness to the game design, it’s that the starting position that you place your initial settlements in is so utterly important that one mistake or miscalculation can cost you the game before you even take your first turn. That said, luck plays a large role in the game as the tiles that produce commodities are activated by a die roll, so even the perfect initial settlement placement can be stymied by straight-up hateful-ass dice. The mitigating factor is that you can trade things every turn, so even if you have bad die rolls, and even if nobody will trade you anything, you can trade things back to the “bank”, at confiscatory rates, to advance your position.

In the end, it’s a really good game that I overlooked for a long time due to a group of guys who poisoned me against it, my own blatant idiocy, and a cacophonous sea of disgust released by dyed-in-the-wool Ameritrashers who decried the game based solely on the fact that it has wooden bits instead of plastic Space Marines. Hell, if this game was re-skinned with Imperial Roads, Ork Outposts, and Tyranid Hives, sort of how Talisman was re-skinned to Relic, Settlers of Catan: 40K edition would be an instant best-seller. And I’d be first in line to buy that crap, aaaaaaw yeah.

Why I’d Settle Down With A Settler:

· Simple rules but complex strategy make this game a real winner

· Player interaction is heavy, with an emphasis on negotiation and screwage

· A modular-board system makes this infinitely replayable

· With many expansions such as the wonderful Seafarers expansion, it’s a living system

Why Catan Means “You’z a Ho” in Catanese:

· Starting positions are so important that it seems almost unbalanced

· The dice-heavy commodity production adds randomness, but can ruin your fun

Overall:

It’s a bit ridiculous to call this a pure Eurogame as the genre exists today because luck and direct player interaction play such a large role in Settlers of Catan. I mean, I understand that it has light rules, and is playable by everyone, so by that standard, it could be construed as a Euro, but it shares so much more with Ameritrashy Dudes On A Map games like Axis and Allies than it does Agricola, in my opinion. The only thing missing from this game is a body count, and with the Cities and Knights expansion, a body count does exist, albeit in a very abstracted way. The long and short is that this game should be in every single gamer’s collection, either physically or digitally, since it’s available for Xbox360, iPad, and on the web.

Rating:

4.5/5 Stars

Check out the website here to see what the game’s like and what expansions exist:

http://www.catan.com/

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By Ken St. Andre

I’ve been a bad blogger. I haven’t written anything for this blog since January 15, and here it the last day of March. My sponsor, GMS Magazine, tried to jog me into action a month ago, and it almost worked, but I got busy or lazy or both. It isn’t hard for me to get lazy–I was born that way. And I was working like crazy on Deluxe Tunnels and Trolls in January and February. I’m still working like crazy on that game, but I could have found time to say something about other games I’ve played or liked.

Saturday, March 30, 2013 was International Tabletop Day. I did get out and do some gaming, and I got to play two of my favourite games–variants of them, at least.

I thought it might be fun to list my favorite tabletop games. This listing is not in order–on any given day I might prefer one game to an other, but in general, I would sit down with people to play any of these games at any time.

Settlers of Catan (and its variants)

My biggest problem with Catan is they have shrunk it down and made it too small and constricted.  I want a board twice this size.  One of the better variants is Star Trek Catan which I played and should have won yesterday, but I made an error at the end and took a Star Trek officer who couldn’t help me at all.  Some day I’m going to get two or three copies of the game, mush them all together into one huge gameboard, play to something like 20 points instead of 10, and set up some quick combat rules for conquering the galaxy.

Ticket to Ride (and its variants)

This railroad-building game has the almost perfect play mechanic–only 3 things to do: draw, build, or choose destinations.  The scoring track around the outside of the board makes you feel like you’re in a race.  There is a fair amount of luck involved, but good strategy is what makes winning possible.

Ticket has several different variants. My favourite is the one for Asia.

Each variant has one or two things that make it different from the others.  It isn’t just a different map. The game designers have really done a great job with this series.

This is the version that I won yesterday. My strategy was to build across the top and down into China and Japan.

Risk! (and its variants)

When  you get right down to it, wargaming is all about conquering the world.  This is the version of Risk that I have, and I don’t get to play it nearly often enough.  I love adding a fantastic flavor to my wargaming.

Forget about the Ring. It’s Elves vs. Orcs vs. Men vs. Dwarves in a winner take all battle for world domination.

Judge Dredd

Way back in 1983 I got lucky and visited England and France for a couple of weeks, attending Games Day in London.  A friend got me into a game of Judge Dread (yes, I already knew about the comic), and I enjoyed it so much that I made a point of getting a copy of the game for myself.  I played it again a couple months ago.  The fun of the game is is the brilliant satire of popular culture and the modern world.  It’s also colorful and fairly fast to play.

My version of the game was printed in 1982.

A quick internet search will show you that there are a lot of different Judge Dredd games available now–many of them computerized versions.  I suspect that the brutal humor of the game carries it and makes it a blast to play no matter what version you’re using, but I’ve only played the old original from the 80s.

Munchkin (and its variants)

Steve Jackson Games is one of the three greatest game publishers in America.  Munchkin is basically a card game but you do need a fair amount of table to spread it out on.  With variants available to take advantage of different aspects of popular culture (Cthulhu, Conan, Munchkin Bites (Goth version), Munchkin Apocalypse, Booty (pirates), Star Munchkin and more), Steve Jackson has mastered the formula of finding a good thing, and then do it again and again and again. (Just like Catan, and Ticket to Ride, and Risk, and others).

Multiplayer, non-collectible, card game with fighting strength based on power conferred by various cards.  It has both humour and a relentless cutthroat dynamic that keeps every game fresh and fun.

I was going to keep today’s blog to five games, but I think I’ll mention one more.  I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a game with some trolls in it, so here’s my favourite trollish board game.

Trollhalla

Remember! Plunder first, then burn!

I admit I do have a weakness for games where you get to be the monster.

The world is full of wonderful games to play.  Heck, I was inventing another one last night.  If you have played any of these games, why not leave a comment, and tell the world how you liked it?

–end

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Lock $ Foils In Crack Addiction

By Peter Ruth II

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m cheap or because I’m a natural-born sceptic, but when it comes to gaming, I’m what one might call a “late adopter”. I didn’t get an Xbox 360 until 2010, I didn’t start playing Heroscape until Wave 6, and I didn’t get Mage Knight: The Board Game until about 3 weeks ago. This is especially true with anything collectible or “living”, because the price for buying into a miniatures game is very high if you make a poor choice.  So, while I played Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing Miniatures game some months ago, I wasn’t excited enough to jump in with both feet and start building fleets. I have maybe three thousand dollars in miniatures and terrain, books, and whatnot, so a game has to be pretty damned good in order for me to even consider buying it.

Well, I had a buddy over yesterday for an X-Wing game day, and after playing my third game, I was hooked. If you want me to just cut to the chase, here goes: X-Wing is the smartest, most entertaining fighter skirmish game I’ve ever played. This says a lot, because I’ve played probably twenty of these games, from Full Thrust to Renegade Legion to Battle Fleet Mars to A Call To Arms; I’ve got a lot of experience with these games and X-Wing is easily the most approachable and tightest.  The draw, for me, is that the game hits that magical sweet spot where complexity and practicality intersect. Very few games ever hit that spot, generally erring either on the side of simulation or oversimplification. X-Wing, however, gets it absolutely perfect, with enough complexity to make it a game worth playing while having very simple, understandable, and intuitive rules that don’t get in the way of the players. It literally blows every other fighter combat game into itty bitty rippy bits.

Now, there’s been a lot of praise about the miniatures on popular bloggers’ sites, on the dreaded BoardGameGeek site, and in the press. From the perspective of someone who is used to buying Descent, with grey, unpainted miniatures, well, maybe that’s true. But from the perspective of someone who has bought and painted hundreds of miniatures, I’m just not all that ultra-impressed. They’re quite good, I’ll totally grant that, but they’re not so good that I’m all crazy over them. The attention to detail on the model sculptures is very, very good, but the paint jobs are no better than your average Star Wars Miniatures Game model. That’s not to say they’re bad, because they’re not, they’re simply not what I would call a ‘gold standard’.

At ten dollars a pack, which comes with one miniature, a modular flight stand, and some cards, it’s a pretty good deal, when you consider everything, but the miniature itself doesn’t command that kind of price. They’re also very fragile, and I can see some of the Tie Fighters, especially, having their wings broken off, requiring glue. The flight stands are also kind of cheap, with the posts being very thin, maybe a tenth of an inch in diameter, and I can see those snapping off as well if you’re not pretty careful, especially since cleanup requires that you break the flight stands into their component bits. Litko makes some replacements that I think surpass the original design from a “monkey-proof” perspective, but I don’t think I’d buy them unless I broke a stand.

Now, the core set comes with all the bits you need to play, such as tokens and whatnot, and it comes with two Tie Fighters and an X-Wing. It’s about $26.00 US all over the internet, and I think that’s a better deal than buying the expansions for ten bucks a piece. There’s a bunch of cards in the box as well, and you can spend some of your battle point allotment buffing up your ships with all kinds of upgrades, like cluster munitions (banned by 108 countries, but not the Empire) and mines, crew, and other goodies. Each ship also has several pilots, which define what abilities its associated model has with it. All in all, it’s a big bunch of stuff in the box, and quite honestly, if you just wanted to buy the box, I think you’d have plenty of adventure for a while until you realize that getting more stuff means more adventure, more variety, and ultimately, a prolonged experience with the game.

The first wave had the core set, Tie Fighter, X-Wing, Y-Wing, and Tie Advanced expansions, and the new wave that just released has several expansions: Millenium Falcon, Slave One, the A-Wing and a Tie Interceptor. After the three plays I had, playing with everything but the A-Wing and Tie Interceptor, I went online and purchased two core sets, two Tie Advanced, two Y-Wings, one A-Wing, the Falcon and Slave One. I paid $144.00 at Miniature Market for the whole lot of it, if that helps you out, and I spent money set aside for a new shotgun, which if you knew me would make you think I’d lost my mind. It’s simply that good. I could play it all day, I suspect, because when my buddy left last night, I was so wound up and itching for another game that it reminded me of how I feel about Heroscape; I could literally play that game for a couple days straight and never get completely worn out on it. Add to that the fact that you can play two to four players, and that it has some interesting scenarios included above and beyond the standard “kill them before they kill you” formula, and it’s a total win.

The game’s core mechanic, the one that really makes it shine, is how it handles movement and turn reconciliation. At the beginning of your turn, each ship has a little disc which you program it’s movement on, and then you put it face down. Each ship then moves and assigns actions from worst pilot to best pilot, and afterward, each ship attacks from best pilot to worst. It’s a very clever system that doesn’t sound like it’s all that novel, but it works so damned well because it provides amazing balance to the asymmetrical forces. You can load up on cheap Tie Fighters, but they’re going to be moving first and shooting last, so the more skilled Rebel pilots may blow you out of space before your cheap ties ever get a shot off. It’s just brilliant.

The thing that really struck me as the pinnacle of the game’s brilliance is that in a game like this, luck can play a huge role, since dice are used for combat resolution, but there are enough options to mitigate bad luck that it makes for an engaging experience. You can expend your ships’ single action per turn to allow re-rolls, to automatically block hits, or repair shields. There’s also range bonuses so that you can think ahead to where a shipwill potentially end its movement, allowing you to roll an extra die if you charge in for the kill, or stay back out of harm’s way. In short, it rewards smart play and risk taking proportionally, which is really hard to do in a game that involves dice.

The only thing that I think might turn some people off is the ruler-based movement system. I think it’s really well done, and it comes with movement templates, but if you’re the kind of person who is really stuck on hex or square movement, it might be a detractor. Luckily, the movement rules are very intuitive and contingencies are built into the rules so that you won’t have to guess at what to do when two ships come into contact with one another. It’s a smart system, and since I’m used to using tape measures to play miniatures games, I thought it was a refreshing departure from the standard hex-based systems. It allows a lot more flexibility, and when it comes to fighter combat games, flexibility is where the tactics are at. There’s nubs built right into the bases, so there’s no room for making mistakes or having rules lawyers get all pissy, which is a welcome design feature that’s often overlooked.

This is a must-have game, no doubt about it. It has everything I want in a game. It’s furious, fun, and matches last about an hour from first move to last dying breath, making it quite fast. It’s an amazing game, and with the large variance in game play based on the fact that each model has maybe thirty permutations when you consider the pilot, weapon, and upgrade cards. I think the only thing that will cause this game to flame-out will be about six months after the point that they stop making new ships. I’d bet there’s going to be dedicated fan-sites if there’s not already, and there’s already a big tournament scene, so maybe, like Heroscape, the game will continue on well past its shelf life has expired. In any event, I know that I’ll be playing it for a very, very long time and my only complaint is that I’m starting so late that I missed out on a lot of the events such as the recent Kessel Run.

Why X-Wing’s Force Is Strong:

• Incredibly approachable game play with simple to understand rules
• Very clean design that’s quite smart without being overburdened by complexity
• Very flexible ship design system allows for a lot of variation in squadron builds
• Scaling of the luck factor allows smarter players to win, although luck is a factor
• Nice ship models help immerse you in the game

X-Wing’s Failures To Launch:

• It’s a bit on the expensive side for a miniatures game
• The models are nice, but the paint jobs are just above average
• The flight stands seem to be on the flimsy side
• Ruler-based measurement can be a turn off to some people.

Overall:

If you like miniatures games, get this today. It’s simply one of the best examples of a mature, well conceived design in recent history. There are a tremendous amount of reasons to buy this game, and the only things I think that might take a bit of the shine off of it for some people is the price, which is a little bit high for a game of this type, and the ruler-based movement, which I love but some people might take exception to. It’s simply brilliant in every way, and I cannot recommend this game highly enough. I put my money where my mouth is, too, and I think for a cheap ass like myself, this is the highest honour I can provide a game – its purchase.

Rating:

5/5 Stars

Learn more about X-Wing at Fantasy Flight’s page here and watch the tutorial:

Read the rules too, by clicking here.
Litko’s Flight Stands, which I think are superior here.

NeoExodus Chronicles: Usual Suspects is available from:

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Of course, here in Scotland it’s pronounced ‘cow’

By Strange Prawn

Much as technology and my bank balance tend toward miniaturization, there seems to have been a recent trend for compact, fast but beautifully formed games, ‘microgames’ I believe the kids are calling them. The poster boy, or rather poster princess, for these recent offerings is undoubtedly the well-regarded Love Letter, a game that revolves around you passing a note of affection to the object of your amorous desires without the knowledge and interference of your fellow players. Brilliant.

Hot on Love Letter’s coat tails, or rather creeping along in the shadows behind it, leering and cracking its knuckles, comes another little beauty called Coup. or possibly ‘Coup City State’. Or ‘Coup: City State’. ‘Coup feat. City State’?

I assume we owe the ambiguity to the pre-existence of another game called Coup, but that’s by the by.

Coup is another one of those games, like The Resistance and Skull and Roses that sidles up to you uninvited and whispers in your ear, all hot breath and spittle, “Do you trust your friends? Family? Spouse?” only to respond with a crack-toothed and doubting grin when you assure it that yes, yes of course you do.

A game of Coup takes about ten minutes, and a more queasy, uncertain and enjoyable ten minutes you will be hard pushed to find, yes sir. The aim of the game is to eliminate every other player by forcing them to turn over the two face-down influence cards everyone is dealt at the start of the game. Once revealed these cards become useless, and as before, if both go face-up you’re out of the game. In theory play revolves around amassing coins, for once in possession of seven of them you can initiate an unopposable coup against a fellow player to force them to flip one of their cards. Towards this end everyone can take one action per turn, the most straightforward of which is to claim income, and take one coin from the bank. Or two if they claim foreign aid, but unlike taking one coin, and in common with everything else you will do in the game, this is not without risks…

See, those influence cards, they represent the people at court over whom you can exert, well, influence. There are five different characters, each appearing three times in the deck. Oh yeah, this tiny box contains 15 cards, some coins, rules and player cheat sheets, and that’s it. And it’s worth every penny.

The first of these jokers (there are no jokers), is the Duke. The Duke’s a fun guy to have around, he’ll net you three coins on your turn, but there’s more, he’ll also let you block any of those other scroungers from claiming foreign aid, should you wish to. The Captain is also handy for your economy, as he enables you to extort two coins, not from the bank, but from another player. Pay up suckers. He also protects you from anyone else trying to pull the same thing on you. As does the Ambassador, who, aside from this defensive sideline, gives you the chance to switch out your influence cards if you don’t like what fate dealt you.

The final pair are the nefarious Assassin (assassins get invited to court now?), who allows you to forego all the couping, and just pay a bargain-price three coins to force another player to turn one of their cards over. Unless of course that player has the final courtier, the Contessa, whose sole purpose in life is apparently to distract Assassins. How she achieves this is a closely guarded secret.

I’m sure from the brief and ham-fisted descriptions above you’ll have been able to deduce some of the finely balanced and gossamer-like network of interaction and counteraction that exists between the roles as designed in the game. It is clear and clever and counts for nothing.

For here is the dark heart of Coup, and every beat pumps not lifeblood, but deceit and distrust. It matters not one iota which two cards you have actually been dealt. You are free to lie, to claim  influence over anybody, and use the associated abilities, whenever you like. Of course, that’s only true as long as you follow the golden rule of Coup: Don’t Get Caught.

For all the talk of coups and assassinations, it is often this very distrust that proves the decisive force in this game. If you sense something fishy going on, say a fourth player has just claimed influence over the Duke, you are free to challenge their action. If you were right to doubt the lying scum, and they cannot produce evidence of their truthfulness by revealing a Duke, they must immediately turn over one of their cards. Contrariwise, if they do show you they had a Duke all along, you must flip one of yours. They then get to shuffle His Dukeness back into the deck and draw a replacement. Who knows what they’ve got there now.

The counteractions can also naturally be challenged, leading to the possibility, nay inevitability, of exchanges like the following:

“I take two of your coins with my Captain”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Really”

“Uh huh.”

“Fine, here he is *shows Captain*”

“Balls. *flips over a Contessa* Okay then, I’ll block you with my Ambassador.”

“What!? Why didn’t you do that to start with!? Rubbish. Don’t believe you.”

“Orly?”

“Yup.”

“Ahem…” *Shows other card, it is an Ambassador*.

“You arse.” *turns over Assassin that replaced the Captain – and was last card*.

I have been on the receiving end of this particular manoeuvre, in all its ruthless tactical brilliance. Look at it, it should be obvious that no one would attempt such a patently ridiculous ploy unless they wanted to be challenged, but then you knew better, didn’t you? You, dear reader, saw that one coming, yes?

Because that’s the other thing Coup says to you. Honeyed words of flattery: You’re a smart cookie, right? You can tell when you’re being lied to, you can look someone in the eye and divine their honesty or otherwise, right? Because, after all, aren’t you just that little bit smarter than they are..?

Of course you’re not, and of course you can’t. But we all like to believe, don’t we, that in that moment when wits clash we have the ability to spot the tells, untangle the deceit, peer down into someone’s very soul and correctly catch them in a heinous lie.

There’s a fine line you need to walk to play the game well, one that meanders between not appearing too strong, not being too obvious and trying to misinform in ways that aren’t so offensive to the other players that they’ll challenge you. Unless you decide to be one of those people who chooses to not to use a power you possess until it’ll definitely piss someone off, in which case I loathe you. I would never do that.

Uh-uh. Not I.

Hopefully sticking to this tricky path will see you into the last two or three, at which point it becomes all about trying to work out, using your suspicions about what your opponents have as well as everyone’s relative wealth, which card or cards you need to ensure victory. Ideally you would actually have them, but hey, as long as they think you have them…

The first few times I played Coup I thought this mathematically predictable aspect to the endgame was  a bit anticlimactic, taking all the bluffing derring-do of before and flattening it into a grey plain of dull inevitability, but I was wrong. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. I now realise the whole game (all ten minutes of it!) should be spent trying to get yourself into a position where the inevitability tilts your way with the final other player, at least assuming you were right about their cards. Which you probably aren’t.

This aspect adds yet another axis of deduction to the n-dimensional bluffogram that represents this game mapped onto fibspace.

So yeah, I usually try and round these things out with a wee bit tying into the introduction, maybe pulling together some of the similes and metaphors I’ve strung throughout the review, if I’ve remembered to do that. But I am just going to say this. Play Coup. Because I can’t think of anything else to say.

Or can I? Aaah….

Coup is available from:

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