I’m going to blame the relatively short month for not getting any blogging done over the course of February, although the blame could just as easily be laid to rest at the door of Half-Term holidays, some unexpected visits from family, or a week off work sick.
Fortunately, the games themselves weren’t so badly impacted, so let’s take a look at what happened…
Mists Over Carcassonne remains my latest obsession. We played no fewer than 20 times this month, mostly still on level 2, although I have tried level 3, just not with a lot of success. The constant balancing act of trying to get points but constantly needing to fend off ghosts is an interesting one, even if the random nature of the tile-pull leaves you largely at the mercy of fate: there’s certainly plenty of wrong things to do, but there’s less-commonly a single ‘right’ decision to make. I’m not sure how far up the various levels I’ll ultimately get – I certainly don’t expect Level 6 to ever become our standard resting place, but all-in-all this game packs a lot of gameplay into a fairly compact box, and it’s clocked up enough hours in the 2 months since Christmas to already be very close to the magic “£5/hour or better” target.
United
you would not believe the amount of controversy created by the inclusion of this shed…
I talked last month about the Marvel United: Multiverse campaign that was already underway. It retained the slightly-more-cosmic-than-I-cared-for focus, but did unlock some interesting things towards the end, including a new version of the Sinister Six, and components to modularise it. I don’t especially care about the various Carnage-themed villains that the pack centres on, but the chance to swap Green Goblin, Hobgoblin, Rhino etc into the Sinister Six mode is definitely appealing. We also got a noticeable number of bigatures in the final days, including a giant-sized Cassie Lang, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, and Fin Fang Foom as the all-in promo. I’m not usually the biggest fan of these (no pun intended), but I do really want to have Cassie in the game, and who doesn’t love a random T-Rex?
Closer to home, it was largely the New Mutants getting played – Warlock, Wolfbane, Mirage, Sunspot and Magik all getting to take on a few X-baddies. It’s interesting to see the light theming between characters who have served on teams together – they still feel very different, but there’s quite a lot of interaction with Crisis Tokens that appears as a mini-theme. I also finished painting the Anti-Heroes from the Season 2 promos: Namor, Emma Frost, Legion, and Marrow – there’s definite appeal to painting 4 miniatures, and immediately having 4 new villains and teams of 3 heroes to face them all from the same exercise.
LCGs
After Mists and United, Marvel Champions was the game that got played the most times, all Mutant-stuff, as I break out from the pre-con decks, and start actually building them into different aspects, with varying levels of success. At the very end of the month I also received Gambit and Rogue – Gambit’s pack in particular comes with some fascinating cards, and looks like the start of a whole new archetype for Justice, centred around managing threat whilst in Alter-Ego mode. I haven’t managed to play Rogue yet, so will have to give her a go in March.
Lord of the Rings was also popular in February, making a late surge to reach 10 plays for the year. I finally got around to trying some of the cards from the end of the first ALEP cycle, producing an Ents and Beornings deck that I was quite pleased with, mostly because it’s called “Does Beorn S*** in the Woods?” and sometimes after a long, tiring week, you just need a joke that looks like it was written by a 9 year-old to get you through the evening. The main weakness of the deck is that it features A LOT of expensive allies, so needs some external resource acceleration – I paired it with a deck using the new Neutral Aragorn and, as I was on a bit of a roll by this point, decide to load it up heavily with neutral cards and call it “Your Neutralness, It’s a Beige Alert!” – this one wasn’t quite as successful, although we still dealt with The Oath pretty handily (it’s far from the hardest quest in the game) I really need to decide what I’m doing with this deck, and whether to keep the meme-y neutrality, or swap out some cards for something a bit more optimised.
Just the one game of Arkham in February, which was still enough to keep it top of the pile by hours. This is going to get played A LOT in March, so a quiet month was probably for the best.
Big Kicks
I do quite like the app in Oathsworn, it does a good job of streamlining the narrative sections, without having to do too much flicking between pages.
Whilst they only got played 2 or 3 times apiece, Massive Darkness 2 and Oathsworn both found their way back to the table for significant chunks of time in February. Massive Darkness 2 has been a fairly regular one for a year now, although I definitely think that I’ll be glad when this current “EVERYTHING from Massive Darkness 1” 4-player campaign is over and we can go back to something a bit more slim-line.
Oathsworn on the other hand is always a more-is-more sort of affair – I’m still not a fan of just how many bits this game has (especially as several of them feel pretty superfluous), and would much have preferred a box that closed a bit more easily, but we enjoyed the CYOA-style half of this chapter, and my wife tolerated the skirmish half, which probably counts as a win – definitely need to play this again soon though, whilst we can both still remember the rules.
New
Having talked at the start of the year about how I have too many games, it may not have been the cleverest decision to acquire more… I picked up 4 that were intended for Ned’s birthday, although 1 – Legends of Andor – was judged on arrival to be a bit too complex, and has notionally been added to my collection, although I haven’t managed to play it yet.
Journey to Mordor is, from a thematic perspective, an absolutely TERRIBLE contribution to the world of Tolkien-inspired gaming, where each of the 2-4 players is a different Hobbit, racing to the be first to cast their Ring into Mount Doom. Each Hobbit also has their own personal Nazgul who seems happy to ignore them in the race across Middle Earth, focused instead on reaching Mount Doom ahead of them first Hobbit to reach Mount Doom before their Nazgul wins! For all the thematic nonsense, it’s also quick, simple, and easy to explain to a 6 year-old, and has been played a few times. I have the Battle of the Five Armies, which is a Hobbit-re-skin of Love Letter, and Knizia’s classic Lord of the Rings both waiting for a calm moment to try.
Keeping up the Tolkien theme, I also kicked off a campaign of The One Ring RPG, with 4 hungry Hobbits ambling their way around the shire, mostly looking for food and/or the pub.
Challenges
My various 2023 gaming challenges continued to make good progress. For my “play 10 specific games 10+ times each, multiplayer only” challenge, Marvel United and Mists Over Carcassonne both hit 10, whilst the 4 games which had only been on a single play after January all got at least one more game, meaning that all 10 games are still dong 1/per month or better, and hopefully this should continue in March.
For the generic “play any 10 games 10 times” I’m already at 79/100, and expect this to be finished off relatively soon, possibly even by Easter. I’ve also managed 66 plays between my 10 most-played solo games, and it’s only really the New Games challenge that’s lagging behind, with barely a 2×2 in terms of an H-Index!
Money
It was a moderately expensive month, between Andor, 2 Hero packs for Champions and the new Star Wars game from FFG, but thanks to the stuff I sold in January, I’m still in the black for 2023 as a whole, at least until the Marvel United Pledge Manager comes along. Sadly, February was also the point at which a whole host of games I picked up last year had been around long enough to start counting their shortfall from £5/hour. Call of Cthulhu LCG and Mists Over Carcassonne are both very close to break-even (and already fine when I factor in other people’s playing time), but The Clone Wars has a way to go, and that great big Undead or Alive kickstarter is still a LONG way short. The shorter average-length of missions is nice for accessibility, but it does mean that I don’t rack up the hours nearly as quickly as I have with previous Zombicides.
Next
There are big plans for March, which will be getting their own write-up very soon. Aside from that, February didn’t see any new Aeon’s End, and I’m now assured that this will be arriving in March, along with City of the Great Machine, a Steampunk Kickstarter from a few years ago which I really hope isn’t going to make me regret backing it on the strength of the added-mid-campaign-by-popular-demand-solo-mode…
It’s my birthday at the end of March. Normally this would mean plenty of new gaming goodies, but as I badgered my wife into getting me the gaming table, and my parents are giving us some cash towards our first overseas holiday in 5 years, it will inevitably be a bit quieter than normal, although I’m still optimistic of 1 or 2 smaller bits from friends.
One thing that definitely will be arriving is FFG’s new Star Wars Deckbuilder, already pre-ordered from the FLGS. More thoughts on this one to follow.
There are plenty more interesting pictures of The Scarlet Keys, but it’s still pretty new, and I want to avoid Spoilers.
Already a month of 2023 has been and gone. It’s a fresh start for the various lists of games. Let’s see what happened.
Living Card Games
Not the official tokens to mark your place in the race, but they cover the table a bit less…
It was a strong start for the co-op LCGs, 3 out of the 4 games most-played by hours. In Arkham Horror, we’ve started a Scarlet Keys campaign, playing 2 scenarios, with another due in early February. It’s been an interesting experience doing the blind play-through as a group of 4 with some friends, rather than just 2 of us at home. Too early to really have much to say on the campaign itself.
Marvel Champions was a little behind Arkham in hours, but is once again the game that has been played the most times. A bit more experimentation with the new X-Men characters and scenarios, my wife and I finished off our Storm and Wolverine 2-player run-through of the Mojo mini-campaign, just in time for The Card Game Cooperative to catch up with expansion designer Tony Fanchi. I’ve also been going back and filling in a few gaps in the history of Hero/Villain match-ups: She-Hulk and Captain America both getting their first plays in quite a while, going up against old favourites like Rhino, Ultron, and Mutagen Formula.
Lord of the Rings didn’t get played as many times as Champions, but is still riding fairly high on the by-hours chart, thanks to an epic 4-player game of Challenge of the Wainriders.
This is a scenario from the final cycle of the game where the heroes are pitted against an enemy, literally racing around a loop of locations, and having to pass tests to pass from one quest card to the next. After a poor start where we found ourselves far behind, we’d put on a sudden burst of progress, overtaking the Wainderider Champons, and looked to be heading for victory. Sadly, we failed 2 Race tests on the final 2 rounds, losing by a single card – as the Hero responsible for that final test was ALEP’s Nob, best known as the barman from The Prancing Pony in Bree, there’s probably an important lesson here about why you shouldn’t drink and drive…
On a role…
It was also a pretty good month for my RPGs, managing to get sessions in for both my D&D games. The Curse Strahd party offered a reminder of why you should never trust adventurers (they “helped” a villager get rid of the Vampire Spawn in his loft by fireballing his shop to ruins) The other game (Out of the Abyss) really struggled for sessions in the second half of 2022, and didn’t get a whole lot down, other than wandering, lost, around some tunnels, but it’s good just to have everyone back at the table. Fortunately, I have months, if not years worth of material in the bag for both of these games, so I don’t need to worry about whether or not it’s ok to buy D&D products from Wizards of the Coast again…
A shot from Avatar, reminding me why the theatre of the mind doesn’t always make for great photos…
It was also exciting as a month where I got to play in multiple RPGs. Our Call of Cthulhu (7e) Masks of Nyarlathotep game finally completed the Prologue, and we’d just been summoned back together, finding our friend/contact dead next to some suspicious looking cultists when a string of other commitments cropped up. We’ll be continuing this one in a fortnight, and are looking forward to getting stuck in.
I also had the session zero for a new game I’m going to be playing in, of the Avatar RPG. We were mostly just establishing the era and area for our game, as well as pencilling in the broad outlines for character-creation, with the game proper kicking off in February, but it was good fun, and it looks like a fascinating system to play – very different from any of the major systems I’ve played before. I’ll post more on this one once there’s actually something to tell.
I’m hoping to get another game session up-and-running soon, namely a The One Ring campaign. I’ve got 4 players and a vague slot in the week lined up, now I just need to finish learning the rules well enough to teach and learn it…
New
There wasn’t much that was brand new in January, but all of the new games from December got played again. Mists of Carcassonne continues to be extremely difficult (I’ve now attempted Level 3 a couple of times, but not gotten anywhere close to beating it), so lots of short games of this, but I also played Call of Cthulhu a few times (a 2-handed solo game, and a proper 1v1 game with a friend), so the next step is definitely to start some proper deck-building, and print off the bits I need for the proper solo mode. The Clone Wars has been played a couple more times, and it feels like we’re starting to get the hang of it, although we’ve only played against the introductory villain and on the easiest difficulty, so there’s plenty of scope to keep playing this one with little danger of getting bored.
Challenges
It was a good start to the year for both the solo challenge and the Hardcore Multiplayer challenge. All 10 games in the Hardcore got played in multiplayer at least once, and several got played multiple times: Arkham, Marvel United, Mists, Zombicide are all at 4 sessions, putting me on 25/100 already.
New games is, unsurprisingly, some way behind, because I don’t have any new games yet. As I think I mentioned in an earlier article, I’m strongly leaning towards counting the things I got for Christmas as “new” for 2023, given that they were only owned for 6 days of 2022 – by that reckoning, 2 sessions of The Clone Wars is a notable stat, but I can’t quite bring myself to include Mists Over Carcassonne, given that it managed 10 plays in that end-of-year week last time.
Money
Compared with a lot of the expansions, which seem pretty hit-and-miss in terms of characters and new mechanics, it’s these decks which feel like they’ll really reinvigorate the game
January was a good month money-wise, as I didn’t spend anything! Obviously, that’s not going to last long, and the Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter is currently looming very large on the horizon. After the X-Men campaign, I hadn’t expected them to do a third one, but they’ve come back with a stated theme of “Multiverse” and a remarkable focus on Marvel Cosmic.
Overall, I’m feeling a little torn on this one: on the one hand, there are some characters included who feel like they fill in a lot of gaps that were previously missed, but there are also a good number of characters that I don’t find that interesting.
Couple that with the fact that they’ve announced a “Spider-geddon” direct-to-retail Core box coming in late spring, which will have SP//DR, Spider-Man Noir, Silk, Superior Spider-Man and others, and there’s a temptation to leave some or all of this behind.
I suspect that the things that will probably sway me into getting most, if not all of the KS content, are the various new card decks that they’re adding: Items, Team decks, Campaign Mode. These look very cool, but they’re definitely going to require a sprawl of content from across the various releases.
Next
February kicks off with Ned’s birthday, and there’s always the hope of a new game or 2 there. I also hear rumours that the Aeon’s End: Past & Future campaign is about to start UK fulfilment, ideally timed, as I’ve just got to the point where last year’s Kickstarter has been played enough to get under the £5/hour mark. Hopefully February will see Rogue and Gambit come join the line-up for Marvel Champions, and I’ve got a few other bits and pieces planned.
2022 was quite a year. From a gaming perspective, it was quite unprecedented in terms of the levels of activity (lots), but a really barren year from a blogging perspective. It’s been a struggle, and very little has managed to happen when and how I’d hoped. Still, plenty of stuff to look back at, so let’s take a peek…
Headlines
First up, the big-picture numbers: I played a whopping 122 different games in 2022, for a staggering 1095 plays total. In both cases, that’s the most I’ve ever managed in a single year, and it’s fairly consistent across the counts – most unique games played, most games played twice or more, ten times or more, twenty times or more – it’s only at the higher end where I fall down – 2015 and 2016 had more games being played 50+ or 100+ times. Of those 122 games, 33 were new to me, with the new games accounting for 218 sessions all-told – that’s around a 5th of all my plays.
In terms of hours, it was a grand total of 759 hours – again a record, edging out 2020 by about two-and-a-half-hours. However, those hours were pretty spread out compared with previous years: the top ten games (by time) accounted for 51% of overall gaming time, which is the lowest since 2018 and the number 1 game accounted for less than 12% of gaming time, which is the lowest since I started keeping track.
Moving on from the big-picture stats, let’s take a look at the specific games that made a splash this year.
LCGs
The co-op LCGs are a cornerstone of a lot of my gaming, and 2022 saw this trend continue. Marvel Champions was played the most times, and Arkham Horror for the most time.
For Marvel, there’s no real surprise here – it was a fantastic year for the game, with the Sinister Motives campaign box, a wave of Champion and Web-Warrior heroes, and then finally the X-Men made their long-awaited arrival in the autumn with the Mutant Genesis box. Honestly, I still haven’t really given the X-Men characters the time they deserve, but SP//DR, Ironheart and Nova were all brilliant, and I’m excited for the future of the game.
For Arkham, it was a bit of a different story. For the vast majority of the year, there was very little in the way of anything new coming along, and honestly I’ve been fairly disillusioned with the game for a fair while. I didn’t especially enjoy The Edge of the Earth as a campaign (a smaller number of massive, sprawling scenarios, with a bit too much narrative text to the point where it felt like an obstacle to actually playing the game), and I had a particularly miserable time playing through it with Daniela Reyes – a character rated highly by many but who, for me, is probably the investigator I would least like to ever have to play again.
The Norman-style deck-building (start in 1 class, level-up to another) feels awkward and clunky at the best of times, and only Lily Chen really feels like she manages to rise above those constraints to actually be fun to play. I was hoping that a mid-year Return to Dream-Eaters might help deal with some of the ongoing disappointment, until FFG announced that this whole product line has been indefinitely paused (the older boxes in the series are already going out-of-print, which is an absolute travesty). With Return to The Circle Undone being the stand-out highlight of 2021, this felt like a huge mis-step.
As a result of all this, I was already in a fairly downbeat mood going into the seemingly-endless “spoiler season” for The Scarlet Keys, where cards were spoiled, seemingly without end, mostly on YouTube, until each new announcement was greeted with internal screaming “just give us the cards already!” The Scarlet Keys investigator expansion (new investigators and player cards) finally arrived in mid-September, and the campaign box right at the end of December, meaning it didn’t actually get played until the New Year.
Fancy new player-board that I got my wife for Christmas
The reason that the game still got so much play-time was mostly because we had ongoing campaigns with other people that had enough momentum to keep going (and when you play this game 3 or 4-player, it can take a LOONG time). The 2-player campaigns that my wife and I were playing (historically the mainstay of my Arkham time) were limited to finishing off Edge of the Earth at the start of the year, and an aborted attempt to revisit an older campaign that ran out of steam mid-year. Solo I managed just a handful of sessions, all standalone, and all because I need to play a specific thing ahead of a podcast episode. We also picked up a sneaky preview of Fortune & Folly towards the end of the year, which needed to be binge-played for a timely review.
Fortune & Folly will be getting a proper release in the spring (the copy I played in the autumn was just a borrowed one), the first session of our Scarlet Keys playthrough last week was quite enjoyable, and we’re also making some headway on a 2-player campaign of Dark Matter, the fan-made campaign that a friend organised a printing of last year, so I expect another strong year for Arkham.
Lord of the Rings is definitely the third-placed of the co-op LCGs these days, but it still puts up a remarkably good showing given its age: 44 games, 28 hours, it was my 4th most-played game on aggregate (despite being 5th by sessions and 6th by time). It’s the only game I own to have logged more than 500 plays in the last 8 years, and if I look at previous years, I have a further 250 logged victories, suggesting that it might not be that far off a round thousand games since it released nearly 12 years ago now.
New?
There weren’t slightly fewer new games this year than last, and they accounted for fewer plays overall, but I wasn’t really expecting Marvel United’s 72 plays to be emulated by another new arrival. Undoubtedly the new game which made the biggest impact in 2022 was Massive Darkness 2. We have a bit of a soft spot for the old Massive Darkness in our house: it’s clunky, and has some definite flaws, along with a difficult curve that frontloads the challenge too much and can make the latter stages a bit formulaic, but my wife is rarely looking for something that’s going to beat us after we’ve put that much time in, anyway.
who DOESN’T want to face a giant, evil, Care Bear in their dungeon-crawling adventures?
Massive Darkness 2 was a Summer 2020 Kickstarter which I was originally all-in for. Sadly, it turned out to be the first Pledge Manager to fall foul of the revisions to VAT law, meaning that when the Pledge Manager arrived, costs had skyrocketed, and I ended up dropping 2 or 3 expansions.
When it arrived, the game turned out to be really good. It’s still a bit on the easy side sometimes, and the games can run REALLY long, but they’ve done a fantastic job of ironing out a lot of the wrinkles, and creating some properly distinct asymmetrical hero classes. We played through the core box, then the truly inspired “Rainbow Crossing” campaign, and are now making our way through the “upgraded” prologue campaign (i.e. the scenarios from the original KS, updated for version 2 rules) – this makes it a fairly epic undertaking (lots of different boxes for all the content from waves old and new), but definitely worth it. 33 hours of this (24 sessions) make it easily a top-ten game, and a standout amongst the new acquisitions.
As well as the hits, there were also some misses in 2022. Biggest disappointment was The Everrain, which finally arrived, a whopping 30 months late! They blamed Covid, but that doesn’t really convince me, given that it was supposed to arrive in October 2019. What I ended up with was a massive box, a vacuum-formed insert that seemed to have been designed with the objective of “how to waste as much space as possible,” a set of playmats that were misprinted and too small to be useable, and a truly dire rulebook. I played it a handful of times, then sold it on, grateful that I wasn’t in America (where most of them still don’t have their games, and the few that are just starting to get their copies have had to pay extra for the privilege. I also received my copy of Nemesis: Lockdown and, whilst I’d say that it’s a much better game objectively, it just felt too much of a punishing slog. I need to learn that, high production values aside, most Awaken Realms games are too grindy to find popularity in this house.
just look at that lid-lift!
One game that I had been really excited for was Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. This one is still here, and wasn’t nearly as bad as the other two – it will definitely get back to the table at some point, but it definitely didn’t quite live up to expectations.
When this was launched, the number of unique mechanics that they were describing felt like a strong positive, but when it came to actually playing it, the game felt a bit more bloated than I’d hoped for. Too much book-keeping, too many fiddly things to keep track of, and an overall sense that the inside of the box was a great big jumble of components that don’t really fit back inside the box once opened!
Most other new arrivals fell into the “it’s fine, we’ll play it periodically” camp – Sentinels of the Multiverse, Flourish, Warhammer Quest, all getting to the table around 10 times. The other 2 big Kickstarters were Trudvang Legends and Zombicide Undead or Alive – also hovering around the ten mark, but hopefully getting a good chunk more table time this year.
A Year of War!
Towards the end of 2021, I took the inevitable and, perhaps surprisingly delayed, step for a board-gamer and lapsed Wargamer living in Nottingham, and played my first game of Warhammer – specifically Age of Sigmar (their recent-ish update on their version of classic fantasy).
2022 saw me take that theme and run with it, playing more Age of Sigmar, and also getting into Warcry (the Age of Sigmar skirmish game), Warhammer Quest (discontinued solo/co-op cardgame from FFG), and even a session of the Warhammer Fantasy RPG.
I suspect that for 2023, it will be more of a focus on Warcry – 45 minutes to an hour is a lot more feasible to fit into the week than a game which can last 3-4 hours, and probably a bit more Warhammer Quest. There was even a brief moment when I figured out how to play the game well, and won a Store Championship! (it was definitely a fluke, and was not repeated).
My attempt to stay rooted in the Fantasy era took a blow at Christmas when a friend bought me a stained glass tank, the obvious gateway drug for a man who loves weird cool machines, and was supposedly trying not to buy in to more eras and rule-systems. I have yet to decide whether my end-goal here is a full 40k army, a Kill Team squad (Kill Team being the 40k-era equivalent to Warcry), or just some pretty tanks sat on my shelf.
Challenges
Every year I like to run a few gaming challenges. I’ve reached the point where a generic 10×10 challenge (play 10 games 10 times) is fairly pointless – last year there were 34 games that got played 10 times, and the top 10 were all played more than 20 times – but I still do a few others. First up was the Hardcore Multiplayer 10×10 Challenge – so Hardcore means that I had to specify the 10 games in advance, and multiplayer speaks for itself. The list for 2022 was as follows: Aeon’s End, Arkham LCG, Cthulhu: Death May Die, Dragomino, Journeys in Middle Earth, LotR LCG, Marvel Champions, Marvel United, Too Many Bones, Zombicide. I wrapped this up in October with the 10th play of Journeys in Middle Earth, which was definitely the game which struggled the most, and has been cut from the 2023 list (see below) but generally speaking all of these got played plenty.
A bit more of a stretch was the 10×10 Solo Challenge. For this one, I certainly didn’t specify the games in advance, and it was wrapped up at the 11th hour: 4 games of Memoir 44 in December making it the last game across the line. The others (in order that they reached 10 plays) were Marvel Champions, Roll Player, Carcassonne, Marvel United, Cartographers, Lord of the Rings, Dominion, Cloudspire, Sentinels of the Multiverse. Of these, Sentinels of the Multiverse was new, and Roll Player was new last Christmas, and barely played prior to 2022. Most of the others are games that have been around a long time and I’d imagine that a 2023 solo list in 12 months’ time would feature a lot of very similar titles.
Technically that’s an 11×10, but I felt that Mists Over Carcassonne deserved an honourable mention…
The most unpredictable of the challenges is always going to be the New games one. Whilst there were a few games which reached 10 plays in next-to-no-time, including a playtest project that I’m just referring to on here as WW, The Crew, and Massive Darkness 2, getting everything else up to 10 proved a stretch, and it was after Christmas before I managed to get the last few games wrapped up. This wasn’t strictly a 10×10 challenge, more of a “5×5, then let’s see what happens” as I don’t want to commit myself to buying games if there’s a chance that nothing comes along which grabs me. Having got that close though, I wanted to round things off.
New challenges
I’m going to keep things more-or-less the same for 2023. A 10×10 Hardcore, multiplayer-only challenge, and a solo 10×10(?) challenge, and a let’s-just-see-how-many New games challenge.
For the hardcore challenge, the line-up is fairly familiar:
Aeon’s End
Arkham LCG
Cthulhu: Death May Die
LotR LCG
Marvel Champions
Marvel United
Massive Darkness 2
Mists Over Carcassonne
Too Many Bones
Zombicide: Undead or Alive
Massive Darkness 2 and Mists Over Carcassonne are the 2 new games here, pushing out Journeys in Middle Earth (because I thought it would get played more) and Dragomino (because I forgot that it was in last year’s challenge, and needed to finalise the list in a hurry, to ensure that all the plays happening in 2023 got counted). As in previous years, I’ve left out RPGs, and only gone for single-iterations of the same game – so no double-counting Marvel United and Marvel United X-Men separately. I’ve also brought in Undead or Alive to replace Fantasy as the Zombicide option – Marvel Zombies should easily make it to 10 plays, assuming it arrives in early Summer as forecast, but I’ve learned from experience not to make promises to play games that haven’t been released yet (or generally that I don’t physically have a copy of in hand), as delays invariably happen.
TOO MANY…
As those who know me are aware, I don’t really like doing things by half-measures. If 2021 was the year where Too Many Bones became a big fixture on my gaming table, 2022 was the year I went overboard. I’d already backed the crowdfunding campaign for Too Many Bones: Unbreakable in November 2011, for the “all new content” option and the Pledge Manager in early 2022 saw me add The Automaton of Shale to my pledge (a 3d pop-up book which also contains new baddies and encounters).
Sadly, as the year wore on, it became increasingly apparent that the Unbreakable campaign wasn’t going to arrive until 2023 and whilst there was plenty of play left in what I had, I was itching for something to mix stuff up a bit.
Over the course of a few months in the summer, I picked up Dart (an armadillo-riding Gearlock for my wife) and the Lab Rats (a tag-team of 4 mini-gearlocks) for myself, followed by a second-hand copy of Splice & Dice via Facebook – whilst primarily a “make stuff harder” box, S&D also contains a couple of new play modes (only 1 of which I’ve really got my teeth into so far) and some new Tyrants to face. Just when I thought I was done, CTG announced “Riffle” a new character who is essentially Gambit from the X-Men, and instead of a full set of dice comes with a gold-embossed custom deck of cards. As this is a direct-from-web-store-only product that will be popping up at semi-random limited moments, I grabbed one where I could, and threw in Gasket, a Mech gearlock so that the flat shipping fee didn’t feel quite so steep, relative to the cost of the actual goods. At this point I think that I’m about 1 Gearlock and a few bags of promos short of having a complete collection, and whilst TMB was played a fair amount in 2022 (16 times/26 hours), it wasn’t really enough to justify the amount that I spent on it. Fortunately, with Riffle and Gasket arriving just before Christmas, and all the Unbreakable stuff due sometime this spring, I’m optimistic of this getting lots of play, with very limited future spend to go with it.
The Blog
2022 was not a great year for the Blog: only 19 articles published, which was half of what I’d managed the previous year and, once you take out the 12 monthly round-ups, totals only 7 pieces of proper content. The only real consolation is that it’s better than I managed on my other blogs, neither of which got a single article.
I’d love to say that 2023 is going to be a revolution with a steady stream of new content, but I’ve been here before, and know that that’s just not that likely to happen. I’m going to be 40 in a couple of months, and both my job and my son are capable of single-handedly exhausting me. I certainly have ideas for more content, but it’s finding the time to turn a rough draft into a formatted post that constantly eludes me.
The last 2 years have been really rough in terms of both physical and mental health, and that inevitably takes its toll – when just getting through the day is a struggle, optional extras like board game reviews tend to get forgotten. I’m definitely looking to beat last year’s total, but beyond that we’ll have to see.
RPGs
On paper, I currently have 4 active RPG campaigns – two Dungeons & Dragons (both as a DM), and two Call of Cthulhu (one as Keeper, one as a player). I played a single session of a Warhammer Fantasy game, which went well, and one-or-two-sessions-in-a-single-chaotic-afternoon of a young-person-friendly RPG called Inspirisles for three five-year-olds when went exactly as badly as you’d expect. The parents of the two children who weren’t mine periodically ask about when the next session will be, but I’m not quite done working through the trauma yet…
One of my D&D games is going pretty well, as is the Cthulhu game I’m playing in, but the other two games have been floundering a bit, after lots of scheduling issues, so these really need a good start to 2023 if they’re going to be a serious part of the future. For 2023 I want to try some more rulesets: I’m definitely going to be trying out the Avatar RPG, and I really want to see up a game using The One Ring and/or Vaesen, as well as finding a way to do something Rokugan/Legend of the Five Rings-related.
The Future
As I understand it, there will be a set of 18 cards that can be combined to make up this image. Presumably at least one of them will be stupidly rare/expensive.
If 2022 was the year of Warhammer, I’m hoping that 2023 will be the year of Star Wars. Between the Clone Wars (definitely not Pandemic) game that I got for Christmas, and the upcoming Star Wars The Deckbuilding Game from FFG, it looks like there should be more in accessible options for gaming a long time ago in a galaxy far away than there have been historically.
2023 also has the somewhat dangerous possibility to be the year that I finally try Magic the Gathering. It’s a game that I’ve never gotten into previously, as it has the potential to be waaaaaaay too much of a time and money sink, and because opponents for 1v1 duelling games are always hard to come by. However, the fact that there’s going to be a Lord of the Rings set, and the implied potential for loads of high-quality new art feels certain to tip me over the edge.
I often go into the year thinking that there isn’t too much that I’m not planning on picking up too many new bits, but those plans don’t necessarily survive contact with reality, as more and more new things come onto my radar.
As far as the 2023 new arrivals/releases that I’ve already identified go, there should be new stuff for the various co-op LCGs as ever (official products for Marvel and Arkham, ALEP stuff for LotR), and Marvel United is about to get another big content injection – a stand-alone Spider-verse box in May will bring SP//DR, and a Season 3 “Multiverse” Kickstarter launches later this week, with a few Legacy/alternate heroes already confirmed (Ironheart, Lady Thor, Shuri Black Panther, Captain Carter) as well as an enormous Galactus (not nearly as enormous as the Marvel Zombies one) I’m also tempted by the additional stuff for HEXplore It that will be coming (the narrative campaign books are gorgeous, and the 5th wave is going to have a combination of Far Eastern and Mesoamerican creatures etc), but need to play what I already have quite a lot more before I can justify anything like that.
In terms of new games, there are two that I’ve had my eye on for a long time, but have been waiting for an expansion to make the game solo/co-op-able. Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, and Doomtown: Reloaded. Doomtown I nearly backed on Kickstarter, but balked at the shipping costs, whereas for Ashes the co-op expansion – “Red Rains – The Corpse of Viros” won’t be appearing until Spring of 2023.
There could be a whole load of Kickstarters arriving this year, from a wide range of projects that stretch all the way back to 2019. At best (if everything finally turns up), I could be looking at seeing Shadows of Brimstone Adventures, Nova Aetas, Freedom Five, Earthborne Rangers, The Isofarian Guard, Too Many Bones Unbreakable, City of the Great Machine, Unsettled, Library Labyrinth, Aeon’s End: Past & Future, Marvel Zombies, 20 Strong and burncycle – that’s 10 new games, plus extra content for 3 more. Given that my games collection is currently sitting at 108 titles (that’s including the section of Ned’s games that I actually consider to be games – anything Haba, Quacks and Co, TTR Junior etc – but not the various iterations on “turn over a card at random and hope it matches your board” or snakes and ladders) that’s really straying too far into too many, so I’ll be attempting another cull sometime soon.
All-in-all, I expect another year packed full with gaming. How readily that translates into a year of blogging remains to be seen. For anyone still reading at this point, thank you – both for sticking with the blog through lean times, and for sticking with this post for the full three-and-a-half-thousand words.
If my ability to get articles out on time is suspect at the best of times, December was never going to be the best of times – family visiting, us away visiting family, the typical seasonal round of coughs and colds, and the unexpected wildcard of emergency dental work all made blogging a struggle.
That said, it was still a pretty good month for gaming – let’s take a look at the highlights.
All-New!
It was a bumper Christmas for new arrivals – not so much in the expansion department, but in terms of brand-new games: Mists Over Carcassonne, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, The Crew, and Celestia.
Mists Over Carcassonne was an instant hit – it’s cooperative, very quick, and really quite challenging, meaning that we could easily lose 2 or 3 games in the space of half-an-hour or so. We’ve really not had a great deal of meaningful success with it – beaten Level 1 a few times, and failed at Level 2 on a couple of occasions, with anything beyond that being off in the distance for now.
Celestia was a bit of a weird one – definitely not a game that had really been on my radar, it found its way into our house, after the following conversation with my 5 year-old son:
“So, what do you want to get mummy for Christmas? A Book? Some music? Some Earrings?”
“A game”
“What sort of game?”
“A grown-up game with a helicopter”
It flies, and is powered by a spinning thing, that’s close enough…
Now, Celestia doesn’t technically have a helicopter, but it does have a flying machine, and it seemed the best fit, based on the suggestions I got when sharing my dilemma on Facebook. We played it a couple of times 2-player, and it really wasn’t that great, but when we wheeled it out with the in-laws, it becomes a much more interesting prospect with a larger group. (Again, it’s pretty quick, at least in introductory mode, which helps).
People might remember me mentioning back in February that I’d spent a very large chunk of a weekend playing The Crew, and I decided to pick up a copy of my own. This is the Deep Sea version (rather than the space one which I’d played earlier), and apparently includes a 2-player variant, although I get the impression that it’s still at its best as a 3+ player game. Again, we managed a few hands over Christmas, although I think people were a bit tired by that point.
Getting The Clone Wars to hit the table proved to be a much more challenging undertaking: I lost the night between family trips, feeling too dead to do anything beyond watching TV, and the trip to my parents drowned in a sea of seemingly endless Mah Jong games dragging on too late in the evening to stay up and figure it out after everyone else had cleared off, I ultimately managed to play this on New Year’s Eve, just the once: enjoyable, but too early to offer many in-depth thoughts.
I wasn’t the only member of the household to get new games either. Ned picked up 3 new titles of his own – Ticket to Ride: First Journey, Quacks and Co, and something called The Muddles. As the resident Quacks fan, the junior version was definitely my idea, and I’ve been sat on this copy since just after I got to try it at UK Games Expo back in June. TTR came from some friends, and The Muddles was my wife’s discovery – it’s a fairly simple matching game from Big Potato, that leans fairly heavily on silly names and cartoon-y art. We’ve only managed a couple of plays of Ticket to Ride and Quacks so far, but he seems relatively engaged with both.
LCGs
After these new arrivals, and a sudden surge of interest in Kerplunk from Ned, it was the Co-op LCGs dominating the table. We managed to finish off 2 Arkham Horror Campaigns, successfully (?) making it out of Antarctica in Edge of the Earth and even escaping Dim Carcosa in our Path to Carcosa campaign. For the new year we’ve got our first play of the new Scarlet Keys campaign planned – this will be a first time doing a blind play-through of a new campaign as a 4-player group, plus we need to finish our Dark Matter play-through and crack on with Alice in Wonderland.
In Lord of the Rings, we were reminded why we never play the Dunlending scenarios, before quickly scooping and going for the slightlyless ridiculous Trouble in Tharbad. We also got to try out the nice wooden token set that I’d got my wife for Christmas and told her to open a week or so early to ensure that they got properly appreciated in their natural habitat.
For Marvel Champions, we saw the belated arrival of the Mojo pack, and started a 2-player run-through of the mini-campaign, taking down Magog and Spiral, with just the eponymous villain to beat. This pack is an absolute blast, and the modular sets add a lot of humour – along with some terrifying spikes of difficulty – to older scenarios.
Money
Money-wise, December was fairly chaotic: lots of bits and pieces I was shelling out for, from LCG expansions, to the pledge manager for the new season of Cthulhu: Death May Die, to a few random purchases on a bit of a whim (and Christmas, of course). The list of games which aren’t being played enough to justify the money spent on them dipped further into the red, with Trudvang Legends now having been around long enough to start counting. I’m not too worried about this one long-term, despite being seriously flawed in a few notable ways, the story and the draw-runes-from-back-and-place-on-cards mechanic are both interesting enough that this is getting a steady couple of plays a month, and I’m sure that once the second wave of content arrives, it’ll quickly be hitting the totals it needs to, if not before.
Aside from Trudvang (second behind Arkham in terms of most table-hours), there were also end-of-year sessions for both D&D campaigns, 2 slightly unexpected games of Eldritch Horror, and a bit more Zombicide: Undead or Alive – the set-ups for the various different scenarios feel a bit more varied than a lot of the earlier Zombicide games, and there are restrictions on what Survivors you can play with in each mission, which gives it a different feel, compared with our typical approach of picking a party and playing through everything with them – fortunately, the box also comes with more survivors than the previous editions did. All-in-all, it was a pretty good start/middle of the month, which almost made up for what felt like endless evenings of visiting/visited grandparents, and the inevitable slog of Mahjong.
…and the rest
I won’t say too much about gaming challenges and the like, as my plan is to be back “soon” with the 2022 year round-up. Likewise, that will be where I talk about the things I’m looking forward to in 2023, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. Happy New(ish) Year everyone!
November was a bumper month – more games played than any month this year, with a whopping 103 sessions / 77 hours, beating 2022’s previous records of 100 and 76.37 respectively. With things on that scale, it can be hard to keep track of exactly what’s been played the most, which is part of the reason I’ve started taking advantage of the funky feature on the BG Stats app which keeps track of the most-played games, by session and by hour.
It’s a helpful reminder, as I’d actually forgotten about Folklore – we finished off Dark Tales right at the start of the month, just in time for my wife to open Fall of the Spire for her birthday, and played the first game of that, before getting distracted by other things!
Let’s have a look at some of the other November highlights.
Arkham
I assume this is what they mean when they say “Money can’t buy you happiness”…
November was a good month for Arkham Horror LCG, thanks in large part to the folk at the Arkham Chronicle who got hold of a copy of the mostly-not-yet-released Standalone scenario Fortune & Folly. It’s actually 2 scenarios in 1 (although the first part is pretty short), and I managed 3 play-throughs, at 3-player, 4-player and solo, just so that we could put not 1, but 2 special episodes of The Card Game Cooperative. Our discussion of the scenario is already live, and it’s taken me so long to post this that our interview with designer and all-round LCG community legend Ian Martin won’t be far behind,
November also saw me take some crucial steps towards the most pointless of decks on my wishlist: 16-sled-dog-Charlie Kane. Normally, you can only have 2 copies of any card in an Akham deck, but Sled Dog is an exception – you can have 4, and put 2 in each ally slot. Given that Charlie has extra ally slots, there’s potential for some enjoyable nonsense as you yoink dogs out of other players’ discard piles, but you have to own enough copies of the dog to being with!
The Blob event also featured a costume competition. I was quite pleased with my Red-Gloved Man (far right), but was thoroughly upstaged by Bark Harrigan (second from left)
Our local-ish game shop ran a The Blob that Ate Everything event for Arkham Nights, meaning that I was able to pick up 4 extra Sled Dogs as promos, planning to run a 12-dog Charlie deck on the first weekend of December when our other local-ish game shop runs their Blob event. It turns out that Blob is actually a time when having stupid numbers of dogs is a really good thing – an enemy which sits in play for 1 round, can take upto 15 damage, but has a fight value of X (where X is the damage already sustained) typically gets harder and harder to fight … UNLESS you can do 15 damage in a single hit! – even without the perfect combo, being able to get to 8 or 10 is still pretty fantastic – being able to come in with 10 dogs for +10 skill and 10 damage on a 5-difficulty combat test is just what the doctor ordered.
Marvel Champions, Marvel United and Carcassonne all had double-figures of plays in November. I absolutely love the solo version of Carcassonne that was released online in 2020, and it’s taken the game from 17 plays across 2015-19 to an average of just over 50 per year since: games are short, typically less than 10 minutes, so it’s pretty easy to rack up a high number of them. I’m hoping to acquire Mists over Carcassonne for Christmas – a cooperative twist on the game, so it will be interesting to see what impact that has on the solo puzzle.
For Marvel Champions, I finally got a proper go at the X-Men, absolutely blasting through the Mutant Genesis campaign box with Storm’s pre-con, and trying a few more scenarios with Wolverine. Next up, I definitely need to start actually deck-building with the mutants – Shadowcat and Colossus seem like the ones who’d benefit the most from a different approach (I’m really not a fan of the Colossus pre-con in particular, so I’ll hopefully get the time to explore that soon.
In (and out of) the Red
My big list of “games that aren’t really value for money” took a bit of a backward step this month, as both the Oathsworn and HEXplore It Kickstarters have been around long enough to start being counted. It’s been a mega-busy month at work for my wife, and something with that level of crunch (or sheer length) just isn’t very appealing right now. I did break Oathsworn out for a solo game, replaying an old encounter to refresh myself on the combat mechanics, and I might well do that again before seeing if we can get it back to the table to actually progress the campaign before the end of the year.
Despite the big new entries in the negative column, I did make some good progress on games that were already there. After a year and a half, the original Marvel United has finally made it to £5/hour. It’s not a game that I was worried about – if you factor in either the MANY hours I’ve spent painting it, or the time spent playing Marvel United with others, then we reached this point a long time ago, but it’s nice to have got there even by the more conservative estimate. Marvel United X-Men by contrast still has a long way to go (again, things look pretty good if I include painting time), and given that it’s having to compete/mix with its elder sibling it will be a long while yet.
Massive Darkness 2 also made a comeback after a slightly quieter couple of months once we finished our initial playthrough of the core box scenarios and Rainbow Crossing – we’re currently playing through the prequel campaign: the scenarios from the original game re-done for the new ruleset, and all the Kickstarter Enemies – we’ve also mixed in the Necromancer Hero from the MD2 Kickstarter, and are controlling 2 heroes each instead of 1. It’s good fun, and gives the game a nice varied feel, but it does also mean that it’s a bit more to set up and process.
Spreading myself too thin?
Having noted in recent months that I was still some way from hitting 10×10 solo games because I have lots of games played a handful of times rather than a solid core of 10, I did the only sensible thing, and branched out even more! 6 games played solo in November that had previously not been on the solo sheet, plus taking Arkham Horror LCG from 1 up to 3 1-player games. Biggest innovation here was playing Zombicide Black Plague solo – I did a bit of this waaaay back in 2016 when I first got the game and was learning the rules, but hadn’t done so in ages, until I spotted that CMON had released a set of solo scenarios on their website. Still lots of fun, and plenty of challenge to be found.
Technically it’s only a net-increase of 1, as Undead or Alive pushes out 1 of the games on 6 plays, but I wanted to show that there was movement.
All-in-all, there’s still a fair chance that I hit 10×10 solo, but I don’t want to be holding myself over a barrel to do it.
For my other challenge: 10 plays of 10 different new games, I made a bit of progress – 3 more sessions of Zombicide: Undead or Alive took that to 7, and I see no reason why that shouldn’t get to 10 before the December is up. That said, 85/100 is quite low to be this late in the year, so I’ll have to see whether this challenge actually gets completed – if I can make it to another Warcry session, then I’ll probably manage it, but if not, I can see myself falling short, unless I decide to really binge something new/not-that-heavily-played-yet.
Mythos
Beyond Arkham LCG, November was a surprisingly good month for all things Mythos.
I don’t EXCLUSIVELY use investigators who have minis from Mansions when playing Eldritch, but it’s certainly a nice bonus.
My wife and I managed to synchronise a day off work for her birthday which saw Eldritch Horror get one of its rare run-outs, we continued our Call of Cthulhu RPG Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign, tried the second of the 3 previously-unplayed Death May Die scenarios, and in perhaps the most surprising twist, introduced my mother-in-law to Mansions of Madness! She ended up coming to stay in order to provide some emergency day-time childcare, and after a couple of games of Pandemic Cthulhu (which she had played before) on the first night, we decided to push things a bit further with our favourite app-sorted mystery game. As I think I mentioned in October, Mansions has fallen a long way down our most-played charts since FFG stopped putting out new content, as the scenarios can get a little stale after a while, and whilst there are some very good fan-made ones on Valkyrie, there are also some fairly poor ones or (more-commonly) just a lot where the minor typos that slipped through proof-reading really break the immersion. Introducing the game to a new player is a nice way to revisit the old scenarios with a fresh twist, and give the game a well-deserved run-out.
Next
December is just around the corner, and I’m expecting a fair few new goodies from Santa (and by Santa, I mostly mean “ordering them myself from the OLGS and then handing them to my wife to wrap”) [in case there’s any lack of clarity, this is because I am a massive pain to buy presents for, rather than any lack of effort on her part]. Whether much of the new stuff will get played in the 6 days between Christmas and year’s end remains to be seen – I may well repeat the tactic of previous years, and treat anything gained from Christmas onwards as “new” for the following year’s spreadsheets.
Ned’s games collection should similarly be being expanded – I’ve had a copy of Quacks and Co sat on the side for him for ages, with Ticket To Ride: My First Journey potentially joining it.
Beyond that, December should have plenty of Arkham, as we look to wrap up some campaigns, more RPGs, and then the inevitable slew of family-friendly stuff as we spend time with grandparents.
With the un-played pile way too big for this late in the year, the size of my collection pushing too far into triple figures, and the average time between plays for games getting ever higher, I decided that it was time to start taking series efforts to thin the herd.
I did a big sales post at the start of October, and met with mixed success.
this is most of what DIDN’T sell…
Nemesis Lockdown and Runebound 3rd edition both sold almost immediately. In both cases, I think I under-priced fairly badly, and could easily have made another £50 quid between the two items – I won’t lose any sleep over the money, but I do wish that people didn’t feel the need to post comments on Facebook along the lines of “wow, a week ago, I missed the deal of the century on Runebound.”
Nemesis is a game I’ve played a reasonable number of times since it arrived at the start of the year, but my wife had made it fairly clear that she wasn’t particularly interested in trying it, and it’s both long and a table-hog. If I’d been a bit more ambitious, I could probably have made a profit on this, but at least as it is, I more than covered the shortfall.
Runebound is a game that I nearly sold a few years back, but my wife urged me to keep it. In the 24ish months since, it’s been played once, and we had a miserable time. It’s certainly not a bad game, but given how little it gets played, and how in-demand it is, it felt daft to keep hold of it.
D-Day Dice and Pandemic Rising Tide were both games that I got ‘free’ (DDD was store credit, PRT was a review). Rising Tide is certainly an interesting twist on the Pandemic mechanic, but realistically it’s behind original, Iberia and Cthulhu to actually get played, so it felt worth moving on. D-Day Dice is one that I’d put solidly in the category of “fine” but it was only ever getting played solo, and there’s enough competition for that time/brain-space. Lastly, Mysterium Park was a game we’d bought in an attempt to make Mysterium work with 2, after giving up on previous attempts to play it remotely via Zoom etc – it never really worked, and this one was just gathering dust.
The rest of the sale post didn’t get as much traction, so I need to re-list with the sold items removed from the picture to see whether it attracts any more offers this time.
Death May Live!
It’s a good job that I did sell all that stuff, because barely a day later, CMON announced their latest Kickstarter – Cthulhu: Death May Die – Season 3!
Unusually for a CMON Kickstarter, the game was available for the public to demo less than a week later at Essenspiel and the early reports were really positive. Despite being a stand-alone game, this new box is fully modular and inter-compatible with the original, offering new Ancient Ones, scenarios, investigators and the like. It also adds an optional Relics module which can be added to any scenario to make it a little easier, and Hidden Monsters which likewise bolt on to any scenario to increase the difficulty (thankfully, CMON very quickly added the cards to make this mechanic backwards compatible, ensuring that I can use the monsters I already have for this). So far it’s been a pretty successful campaign, but I’m really hoping that we can get at least one much Ancient One unlocked via stretch-goals and/or a season 4 add-on with another half-dozen episodes included in the week-or-so left on the campaign.
Just because of the general risks that seem to surround CMON Kickstarters and shipping costs right now, I’ve only pledged for $1, and they seem to be going a bit left-field with their optional buys this time around (pet cat anyone?) but I suspect I’ll end up getting most of what’s offered, at least in terms of actual gameplay.
20?
In case October wasn’t making enough demands on my wallet, I’ve also backed Chip Theory’s campaign for “20 Strong” a new solo-only dice game, which features modular decks for new IP “Solar Sentinels” as well as more familiar settings Too Many Bones and Hoplomachus. By the standards of both Chip Theory and modern-day Kickstarters more generally, this one is fairly reasonably priced at $65 all-in, for the base game, 2 expansion decks, and free shipping. As the campaign doesn’t end until November, that’s when it will find its way onto the spreadsheet, but the decision is more-or-less made already.
Buying and selling aside, I did actually manage to play some games this month. Better late than never, let’s take a look.
Spooky Season
CMON announced wit the DMD reveal that they were wanting to align the KS with “spooky season” and the October nights drawing in certainly felt like a good excuse to swing things back towards the horror side of the collection.
Unfathomable: BEFORE the ship sank…
Mansions of Madness is a game where I think I own all of the official content, fully painted and with the monsters on custom bases. It got played A LOT back in the day, but has fallen out of favour the past few years, as they’ve stopped releasing new scenarios, and the replay value is definitely diminished when you get over-familiar with what any given scenario is asking of you. There is a rich mine of fan-made content out there, but identifying the best bits can be a bit tricky, and the mental overhead has put me off. First play of the year, hopefully we’ll beat last year’s 2 sessions by the end of December.
One game which is never going to be getting much past 3 or 4 plays a year is Unfathomable – 4-6 players and 4 hours long will do that to a game. Still, we managed our third session of the year, taking advantage of Ned being at his grandparents (and thus knowing that we weren’t going to have to get up at 6am on a Saturday!)
Dark Matter brings back “hidden cards” – I just wish I didn’t have 4 of them at once to deal with!
There was a moment of mild panic that I might have made a mistake in inviting our friends over to play a week before their wedding – the Bride-to-be and I ended up as the Deep Ones, and we successfully sank the ship, drowning all the humans, but not before the groom reminded her loudly “we’re not married yet, you know!” (fortunately, we went to the Wedding a week later, and can confirm that it all went off without any soap-opera-style drama).
I’ve found myself strangely unmoved by the release of the Scarlet Keys investigator expansion for Arkham Horror, yet to play any of the investigators, and having barely incorporated any of the player cards into decks. That said, we did still get a few games in this month: right at the start of October we played an Epic Multiplayer session of Machinations Through Time, and we also continued our Edge of the Earth campaign, and even started up a new 2-player campaign at home. My wife and I are taking parallel Wendy and parallel Roland through the fan-made campaign Dark Matter – only 2 sessions in, but enjoying the fresh scenarios to face. (I even built Roland a deck focused around one of the new customisable cards, spent a big chunk of XP on it … and then completely failed to draw either copy at any point across the 2 scenarios we played…)
LCGs
It was a strong month for all the LCGs, with Marvel Champions and Lord of the Rings both getting played 10 times. For Lord of the Rings, I started the month trying to defeat some of the quests from Oaths of the Rohirrim that I hadn’t previously managed, then the last week or so of October saw the game undergoing a sudden resurgence as I finally got round to figuring out Dragn Cards, an online platform that allows me to play the game without spending a million hours finding, sleeving, and shuffling individual cards. Great fun, but somewhat perilous for my long-term productivity when trying to get anything done on the computer…
next up for Marvel United: Hope & the Phoenix Five
For Marvel Champions, there was a good amount of play, but somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t find myself as gripped by the X-Men release as much as I’d thought I would be. Kitty Pryde is a strong contender for my all-time favourite comic character, but trying to play through the scenarios with her and Colossus in their pre-con forms brought us crashing back down to earth with a bump, as neither really has any way to remove threat reliably. I need to get some new decks built and take another run at things here.
Although not an LCG, Marvel United is still hitting the table – The Fantastic Four were the most recent bunch to get painted up, taking on Dr Doom and his Doombots, and I’ve had a few fun games with them – they seem decent at a 2-hero count, but their team card suggests that they could get ridiculously strong in 3 or 4-player with an all F4 team. I am overdue a She-Hulk/Daredevil team-up though…
This town ain’t big enough for the Undead.
My big October arrival was the Zombicide: Undead or Alive kickstarter. It came towards the end of the month, so we were only able to get so far into it, but first impressions are good.
the base game HAS been played already, I just forgot to take pictures…
This is our 3 non-compatible iteration of Zombicide, following Medieval/Fantasy and Space (which I typically refer to as Xenocide on here), set to be joined by a 4th sometime in 2023 when Marvel Zombies arrives. 3 big boxes plus a selection of smaller ones, it’s another chunky outlay in terms of cash, shelf-space, and implied time to play.
One of the big appeals for me, was the fact that the Gears and Guns expansion, as well as giving everything a steampunk twist, adds a campaign mode in to Zombicide. As “Modern” in its various forms is a type of Zombicide that we’ve always avoided, we’ve never had a chance to string the scenarios together in a meaningful way like this, so I really like the idea of being able to get that overarching campaign that we enjoy, but attached to a game that doesn’t get bogged down under it’s own weight mechanically.
There are other gameplay innovations – Survivors being sub-defined by class, no doors, a different approach to zombie spawns, a great big steam-train, and even horses. There’s definitely more that I think they could have done with the concept, but all-in-all, it felt worth getting involved in.
On top of that, the minis for this game look really nice. When Shadows of Brimstone returns to prominence (probably next year when we should finally get some of the Adventures content) I can definitely see myself taking minis from this to use in place of the often somewhat lacklustre ones coming from Flying Frog.
It is still a lot of additional content for a game that 1) I already have multiple versions of, and 2) is a long way from the 2016-18 period when it was comfortably our most-played game 3 years running. That said, if I combine times for the 3 different versions, it still finds its way into 4th play for 2022, behind Marvel Champions, Arkham Horror, and Dungeons & Dragons, which is still not too shabby. I’m still not 100% that even rocking-chair Bernie would have been enough to tempt me if I had known that Marvel Zombies would be coming a little over a year later, but I don’t have any major regrets about my purchase.
Numbers
October was a good month money-wise: as already noted, I sold several games, and the only thing I spent cash on was a new Arkham expansion. Additionally, most of the places I have games looking like bad value for money all saw leaps in the right direction. November is likely to lurch to the other extreme, with the possibility of a triple-release for Marvel Champions, 2 or 3 crowd-funding campaigns concluding (Death May Die, 20 Strong), and another couple wrapping up their Pledge Managers, forcing me to actually commit to decisions on a few games that I’ve been deliberating on (Unsettled, burncycle).
Challenges
I mentioned last time out that both the solo and the new challenges were lagging a bit, but thankfully October saw a few free evenings over half-term meant that I was able to make some good progress here.
Sentinels of the Multiverse has hit 10 sessions, 9 of them solo, and I added a few more plays of Warhammer Quest as well. 1 more and 3 more games of these two titles respectively would be enough to finish off the solo challenge.
In terms of the new games challenge, there’s still a bit more of a way to go, if 10×10 is the ultimate goal (this isn’t necessarily the case, but I do like a nice round number).
82/100 isn’t bad, but when you factor in one of those games being Warcry, which I can only play if I make it down to the FLGS, and Library Labyrinth being a game I no longer have access to, then there’s still a bit of work to go if I’m going to manage to have played 10 new games 10 times.
In terms of games that I DO still have access to, Flourish continues to make small increments of progress, whilst Trudvang Legends and Zombicide: Undead or Alive have both hit the ground running – I might well not get to 10 plays of 10 new games this year, but should hopefully be able to manage at least 7×7 or 8×8.
November
Aside from Marvel Champions, the only “new” arrival I’m expecting for November is my wife’s birthday present, and I’m not going to mention it here in case she breaks the habit of a lifetime and reads this article. I’m hoping that there will be an Arkham Nights event or 2 that I can make it along to, (need to get some promo sled dogs…) but otherwise there’s nothing out of the ordinary planned. That’s not a worry, as there’s plenty of stuff that I’ve been meaning to play and haven’t quite managed in recent weeks and months, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a bit more done there.
Autumn is here! The children are back to school* and the nights are drawing in. No more wandering off on holiday, and hopefully more time at home, getting back to the things we enjoy doing.
(helpfully, Ned managed only 3 days back at school before needing a week off with Chicken Pox, which was somewhat disruptive of gaming plans, but all is back to normal now).
Marvels
Coming soon! (probably)
It was another strong month for Marvel, with both Champions and United getting played a fair amount, as well as a bit of Legendary. For Marvel Champions, I had originally made it my mission to play every hero against every villain released, but now that we’re upto just shy of 1000 different combinations, I’ve abandoned that idea in favour of just trying to play each hero against the 5-7 villains that were part of the same release cycle as them, and I’ve been making good progress here with the Spiders/Champions wave, just Ghost-Spider vs Venom Goblin to go. Spider-Ham still hasn’t really clicked for me, but Nova, Ironheart, and Peni are all huge fun, and Miles and Gwen can be good with the right deck too. October sees the Dawn of X, as we get out first 4 mutant heroes: Shadowcat, Colossus, Phoenix, and Cyclops, so really looking forward to that new era of the game.
well, I certainly won’t be getting these from that source…
For Marvel United I’m not expecting any new content, aside from maybe hunting down Print-and-Play versions of the 2 convention heroes released over the summer, but given that my son only every really wants to play 1 of about 3 or 4 Heroes, I’ve still got plenty to go, and have been working my way through some of the stretch-goal heroes from the original wave that hadn’t hit the table until now: As I often take inspiration from whatever we happen to be watching, it was disappointing to realise/remember that there is no Wong in Marvel United (he’s also not in Legendary, and only appears as Dr Strange’s signature ally in Champions), so She-Hulk will have to look elsewhere for a team-up.
When the Chips are Down
I played 3 more games of Too Many Bones this month. As I noted at the end of August, the Unbreakable Kickstarter is now looking likely to be a 2023 arrival, but we’re enjoying an Undertow playthrough, despite me making an absolute hash of the campaign mode. I’ve also been making some solo attempts at the “Nobulous Apprenticeship Programme” from a copy of Splice & Dice that I picked up second hand (it’s a separate game, played using components from the rest of TMB). Having been sceptical of the Chip Theory approach to materials for a long time, the Gameplay of Too Many Bones has really hooked me in, and I ended up placing another order this month, as they announced their new limited-edition Gearlock, Riffle.
Some folk have gotten fairly irked by this – the character is exclusive to the Chip Theory webstore, not available in Pledge Managers for their other projects, and was available for 48 hours only! Chip Theory have confirmed that this mysterious character will re-appear, probably 2-3 times a year, but only for 24 hours at a time. Personally, I found myself surprisingly unphased by it all – It’s a gimmick. It’s a way to drive traffic to their webstore (which is the only way they sell their games outside of crowdfunding), and the shipping does mean that buying a single product isn’t the most cost-effective way, but at the end of the day, nobody held a gun to my head and said “you have to buy this new Gearlock who has an actual gold-embossed deck of playing cards, and is essentially Gambit from the X-Men” – I took the opportunity to add Gasket at the same time, just to even out the postage as a portion of the total. That’s how it works? Right? …
I also got a few more solo games of Cloudspire in – I’ve taken the not-so-subtle hints that my wife isn’t particularly interested in trying it again any time soon, but I had a reasonable amount of success in the most recent solo plays, and actually managed to win one of the scenarios (not a maximum renown win or anything crazy like that, but still technically a success).
The Pledge Manager for burncycle is up, and I probably need to decide soon whether I’m actually going to go for it. Alternatively, CTG just announced an upcoming campaign for a mini-game called “20 Strong” which looks like it might be a bit more accessible/manageable. I’ll await further details with interest.
The Unplayed
With the year ¾ over, an un-played pile in excess of 20 games is definitely not something I’m thrilled about. I managed to cross a few titles off the list this month: Trudvang Legends was the newest, but we also saw Pathfinder ACG and Ticket to Ride getting played for the first time in 2022.
Pathfinder is a game that I used to play a lot of, and probably own far more than I’m ever likely to use again, but the resale value is pretty minimal, so it tends to just sit on a shelf that’s inconveniently located behind a chair – I did actually quite enjoy this session, as a pair of foolhardy Goblins successfully disarmed some traps and rounded up the local poisoner, so might try to give this more of a sustained run-out, rather than waiting another year for a singe box-ticking session.
“What’s the card with the sofa on, then?” – my father (yes, really)
Ticket to Ride is the sort of game that I don’t see us getting rid of any time soon – whilst it’s almost never the thing we’d get out for an evening with just the two of us at home, it’s sufficiently simple and well-known that it’s an ideal choice for when people who aren’t really into games fancy a game. In order to avoid yet another Mah Jong session, I broke this one out with my parents, and was truly astonished at just how far my father’s ability to not grasp the rules of a single game can go: I thought we were making some headway when I explained for the 8th or 9th time how grey routes worked, only for us to reach final scoring, and discovered that he had completed a grand total of 1 route for an impressive minus 47 in end-game scoring, having not even remotely attempted his long route. My mother’s overall fate was similarly poor, but she had at least tried, falling just short as she failed to connect the two halves of her sprawling network, and forgot how the Stations worked.
I definitely need to try to sell some games sometime soon – the overall net spend for the year is getting bigger, and I have neither the time nor the space for all the ones still here. Hopefully I’ll make some progress on this in October.
Challenges
Sporadic progress for the new-to-me games
Aside from Too Many Bones rounding out its 10 Multiplayer sessions, we also finished off our Journeys in Middle Earth campaign this month. Sadly, that leaves the game (and the 10×10 Hardcore Challenge overall) 1 play short of completing the 10/100 multiplayer games for the year. I’ve been painting the monsters for the final big box expansion (I did the heroes a few months back), so hopefully we’ll be ready to jump into a campaign of that sometime soon.
I made steady progress on the New Games challenge – still only an H-Index of 6, but Sentinels of the Multiverse and Karuba Junior both got several sessions, along with a few others that are ticking along more slowly
Likewise on the Solo challenge, Sentinels was one of the big movers, along with Cloudspire reaching 9, and Dominion and Lord of the Rings LCG both getting to the full 10. I’m still not quite sure what the 10th game is going to be here (Library Labyrinth was a prototype/review copy that I no longer have access to, and the Kickstarter won’t fulfil until next year), but there are a few possibilities hovering around 4 and 5.
Next
October should be fun. I’m expecting to have a big pile of Mutant-y goodness for Marvel Champions, along with The Scarlet Keys Investigator expansion for Arkham Horror. Kickstarter-wise, Zombicide Undead or Alive should be arriving, so it will be interesting to see how the newest iteration of one of our favourite games is received, and I’m particularly interested to see what kind of job they’ve done with the campaign mode. As the autumn nights draw in, it’s a reminder that Mansions of Madness hasn’t been played in a while, and other more horror-y titles like Folklore and Tainted Grail seem thematically fitting, assuming we can find the time.
August is always a bit of a strange time, and that was magnified this year as we dealt with having a school-age child in the house, and the impact that that has on work, holidays and the like.
One of the most striking things about this August was just how much time we spent away – a full week in a no-internet cabin on a holiday site with my parents, plus various nights away at both my parents and my in-laws. Probably the most significant consequence of that, was that I have now clocked up over 10 sessions of Mah Jong, for over 12 hours of table-time – at this point it’s my 16th-most-played game of the year which is impressive(?) for something I don’t even enjoy all that much.
The holiday also saw a return for other titles that hadn’t been played in a fair while – Mapominoes and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective had both been gathering dust for well over a year and whilst Codenames Duet did get its first run-out in July, it saw a lot more playtime in August.
Swords are of use here…
I’ve mentioned in the past the fact that I have a fairly large Sword & Sorcery: Ancient Chronicles collection from the 2018 Kickstarter, and that thanks to somewhat unwieldy rulebooks etc, it was still sitting on a huge deficit, more than a year after I’d received it.
August was the point when I, somewhat tentatively, decide to introduce it to my wife and was completely blown away by the reception it got. Admittedly I’ve got the rules reasonably well down by now, which helps things run smoothly, and we were definitely playing on the easiest of settings, but taking advantage of some bank holiday grandparent-child-care, we played 3 times in 2 days, clocking up about 5 hours, and defeating the first 3 quests pretty handily.
Living Cards
where to travel? there are just so many options…
All of the Co-op LCGs got played in August. For Lord of the Rings, we introduced a friend to the game with Passage Through Mirkwood, whilst my wife and I started a run against the Shadow in the East Box (on Easy, obviously). We managed to get through The River Running at the first attempt, and eventually beat Danger in Dorwinion as well – it’s a very interesting quest that feels like a revised version of the Steward’s Fear, in terms of needing to explore locations to make progress, and coming up against a randomised plot and villain each time. We needed a bit of luck with the randomised elements to make it through this.
For Marvel Champions, my wife and I bear The Hood, but most of my games were continuing solo runs of the various Sinsiter Motives Heroes and villains (plus War Machine, who is technically part of the previous cycle, but arrived much later). I’m still trying to find a War Machine or Spider-Ham deck that I’m really happy with for true solo, but Nova, Ironheart and SP//DR are great in pretty-much whichever aspect they find themselves.
For Arkham Horror, we continued our 4-player Edge of the Earth campaign, and our 3-player Carcosa campaign. We recently realised a fairly major error that we made earlier in the campaign for Edge, but are way too far gone to correct it. Calvin and Patrice are doing most of the heavy lifting here, with Nathaniel constantly poised just waiting for an enemy to appear (when they do, it’s always 2 at once) whilst I contemplate the folly of having played Forced Learning in a campaign with Tekeli-li.
My deck is functioning much better in Path to Carcosa, possibly because I net-decked (at least the starting point). As a party we still lack firepower when it comes to combat – Rita with the Ornate Bow is about the extent of our ability to kill things unless Sefina happens to draw the right event. I haven’t even bothered including Shrivelling in my Daisy deck. 2 scenarios left on this one (or just the 1 if we do really badly…)
RPG Call back
It had been absolutely months since our Call of Cthulhu group managed to get together, mostly down to one of the players getting a new job, which massively curtailed his evening availability, but we took advantage of the summer lull to resume things. As ever, the group are bumbling their way around Berlin obsessing over minor details, and missing big hooks. Right now, they’ve got about 48 hours to prevent the end of the world, so it will be interesting to see how that works out.
Hopefully in September I’ll be doing the unthinkable and actually playing an RPG for the first time in 2 years, as my wife and I have signed up for a Masks or Nyarlathotep campaign (go big or go home, right?) so I’m looking forward to that.
I used my time away on holiday to read through some of the other RPG books that I have around – realistically I’m not going to have the time or the players to run an actual Adventures in Rokugan game, but I definitely want to incorporate a few of these ideas elsewhere (it’s more-or-less a D&D 5e book, but with its own classes and a magic-replacement system), and The One Ring is definitely on my long-term list, it just might not be this year.
Challenges
Not a whole lot to report on the Challenges front. Lord of the Rings now has more than 10 multiplayer games for the year, so it’s just Too Many Bones and Journeys in Middle Earth needed to finish off here – 95/100.
Another session of Sentinels of the Multiverse put me at 6×6 for new games (I’m no longer counting Marvel United X-Men as “new”) and I also added another session apiece of Nemesis and Flourish, along with 5 games of the brand new Karuba Junior. This is definitely one of Ned’s games rather than mine, and only takes 5 minutes tops, but seems to have gone down well.
In the solo challenge, the most discernible progress was Dominion jumping from 4 to 8 sessions, and I’m sure that I’ll have this up to 10 pretty quickly. The last 4 games to complete the solo 10×10 are still decidedly in flux. I’m sure that Lord of the Rings LCG will be one of them, but the jury’s still out on the other 3.
Money
August was definitely not a cheap month, as I ended up buying a fair few unexpected bits and pieces. I had shipping to pay for Aeon’s End: Past & Future, plus putting in a pre-order for the hefty burst of Marvel Champions Mutant content due around the end of September.
I also picked up a second-hand Dominion expansion, Messiah Complex for Marvel Legendary, and some bits for Too Many Bones to tide me over in the wake of the revelation that Unbreakable is likely to be making its appearance very late in 2022, if it even manages to arrive this year at all. Dominion is one of the ‘modern’ board games that I’ve owned the longest, and I’ve always had a definite fondness for it, but my wife really isn’t much of a fan, meaning that 99% of what I play today is a homebrewed solo/co-op version. Still, even within those limited parameters, it’s nice to refresh the card-pool, and my collection hadn’t been added to in several years (I think it might have been 2016, but that feels crazy).
Despite the outlay, my overall totals of games failing to hit the £5/hour mark still saw a noticeable improvement, thanks to all those hours of Sword & Sorcery, plus a game of Nemesis and a bit more Marvel United.
Next
Trudvang Legends was the big August arrival not to get played, one half of a much-delayed 2019 Kickstarter, so getting that to the table is a priority for September, along with the various expansions mentioned above, most of which I’ve only started to explore. We have an Arkham LCG event due early September as well, so looking forward to that, and it would be nice to try to finish off the 10×10 Hardcore challenge, but other than that I’m not expecting many huge changes – October looks set to be a month with far more new things hitting the table.
Inevitably, no sooner was June over than July came hard on its heels. It’s another month where I haven’t managed to publish anything on here.
Having identified a bunch of short-fallers last month, it was pleasing to be able to at least partially cross a few off. Warhammer Quest and Roll Player both making it past the £5/hour or better threshold:
Warhammer Quest is fun, and seems pretty well-balanced: I’ve probably lost at least half of my games but all within striking distance of victory (at least since I stopped playing with the wrong version of the heroes). As the game got cancelled before they could make campaign expansions, there’s only a limited amount of content, so I’m taking this relatively steadily. Roll Player is definitely improved by the expansion, but still feels like it’s lacking a little something, and as I don’t really feel like investing in another expansion, I may well end up moving this along eventually. Cloudspire got played 4 times this month – once with the friend who introduced it to me in the first place, a solo session, and another attempt to introduce the game to my wife. The first one of these ended extremely quickly in death, whilst the second one we actually won* (I don’t think we got all the renown, but we were alive at the end, having completed at least one objective) but I can tell that she’s still not hugely keen on it. I’ll probably give this one more try before accepting that the level of abstract crunch, combined with how limited your options are in a lot of cases mean that this just won’t be her cup of tea.
Long Time, No See
I managed to dust off a few games that hadn’t been played in a while – Boggle, Codenames Duet and Dungeon Time all getting played this month. I think that part of the issue with these smaller filler games is that the short sessions of this type typically go to Marvel United these days. The outstanding stack of games un-played in 2022 is still a bit bigger than I’d like, 29 games, including the stack of weird review stuff I got handed at Expo.
July also saw a comeback for a few games that had been played this year, but not for a while: Memoir ’44, Eldritch Horror, Xenocide and Folklore all getting a good few hours/sessions of play.
Kick the ground running
I mentioned in the June round-up that I’d just received Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood, and July also saw the coming of HEXplore It: Domain of Mirza Noctis.
Oathsworn got a nice strong start, being played 4 times (2 stories and 2 encounters). Billed by some people as the successor to Gloomhaven, it’s certainly got the enormous box (this is the standee version) and the writing takes it to a whole new level, whilst the encounter combat has some really innovative mechanisms. However, it’s also inherited Gloomhaven’s “slightly-too-many-fiddly-components” and “lid doesn’t go back on the box properly” – right now we’re enjoying it, and making our way through the story at a fair pace, although for the 9.2 average rating it currently has on Board Game Geek, I’d have hoped for a smoother set-up/tear-down experience, and a box that actually held the components.
HEXplore It is a game that I picked up last year, played a few times, and wanted to get a bit more stuck into, so I backed the campaign for the 4th wave of the game, which includes a new standalone game where, presumably for legal purposes, you’re definitely NOT facing off against Strahd or Dracula, but a completely original Vampire type named “Mirza Noctis” I also grabbed “Klik’s Madness” a narrative prequel campaign for the original box. The main obstacle in playing more HEXplore It, is just how long the game can run (our first 2-player session earlier this year clocked in at a whopping 4 hours), but this – at least in theory – is where the game table comes into its own, allowing us to stagger a game over 2 evenings. Thanks to a bit of time off before school broke up, we did manage to play the prologue of Klik’s Madness, and I’m hoping to dive into the Mirza Noctis box soon.
To Young to (Rock and) Roll (Dice?)
Probably the most foolish thing I attempted gaming-wise in July, was to run an RPG session for a group of 5 year-olds. I had hoped that 3 kids, each with a parent for a 1-to-1 adult/child ratio would be enough to keep things in hand, not really allowing for the amount of chaos that seems to be generated just by putting small people in the same room (or building, come to that).
The game we tried was Inspirisles, a beautifully illustrated narrative-heavy RPG that I picked up at Dragonmeet back in December, and had been not-quite-getting-round-to-reading ever since. Whilst it definitely aims for a younger audience, I think they probably had teens in mind, rather than kids who are only just learning to read and write, and I certainly hadn’t factored in just how poor Ned’s concentration is.
They successfully created some characters, and then caught and cooked a fish, which was probably about as much as could have been hoped for, and Ned had basically lost interest and wandered off by then. He then asked the following morning whether we were carrying on, apparently failing to notice that his friends had gone home. The other dads seem to think that I’m going to try and run this again at some point. Personally, I’m far less convinced.
July was also a month for trying to get back on track with some of the more normal RPGs – Dungeons & Dragons back after its unexpected month of to continue wandering through the Underdark, and make some deals with Demons – what could possibly go wrong there? The Waterdeep crew had a fairly uneventful shopping session as they gear up for August, when they should be finally heading to Barovia, intent on killing Strahd. The session did mark an important milestone though, as they reached that sacred rite of passage through which every D&D group must ultimately go: trying to weaponise a Decanter of Endless Water (this time in trying to exploit the Vampiric vulnerability to running water). You can find out how that goes when I publish their obituaries.
The Living
Aside from the things highlighted above, July was still a fairly normal month, which means plenty of co-op LCGs. Arkham Horror was the game which saw the most hours on the table as we continued both our 4-player Edge of the Earth campaign and our 3-player Path to Carcosa session. The most sessions were for Marvel Champions, where I started to test the waters with SP//DR and Spider-Ham, then mostly fell back on just smashing things in the face with Ironheart.
Aside from these 2, Cloudspire and Oathsworn were the only games to break the 5-hour mark. Marvel United also got played 8 times, and Lord of the Rings, despite remaining the least-played of the LCGs, did still get 3 sessions in, as we tried out the new Bree deck from ALEP, and my wife tried (and failed) not to laugh at having a Hero called “Nob.”
Numbers
July was never going to look good from a numbers-on-spreadsheets perspective, as Marvel United X-Men has now been around long enough to start counting, and still has a BIG deficit when I’m looking for games to hit that £5/hour mark. However, as already noted, I did manage to get Roll Player and Warhammer Quest up to break-even point, whilst Cloudspire broke even on the by-player count, and Massive Darkness 2 now has a deficit of less than £1 when measured by-player. I spent a bit of money – 2 new Hero packs for Marvel Champions, and a second-hand copy of Sentinels of the Multiverse, but I got a decent deal on that, so it will hopefully have been played enough by the time it starts troubling the spreadsheet.
As ever, it’s big Kickstarter campaigns that pose the largest threat to an appearance of fiscal responsibility. I didn’t really give burncycle much of a look when it first came out (and that lower-case “b” is driving me crazy), but the reviews seem really positive, so the reprint campaign has definitely caught my eye. I ended up backing this for $1, as some money that I was expecting to receive didn’t materialise on time, and I’ll look again when the Pledge Manager opens in a month or so.
Challenges
All 3 of the games still active in my hardcore 10×10 Challenge got played multiple times in July: 2 sessions each for Journeys in Middle Earth and Too Many Bones, and 3 for Lord of the Rings. Our TMB Age of Tyranny campaign has finished, and we’re now revisiting Undertow, but with the baddies from the base game (and 40 Days) mixed in. I also acquired a new (set of) Gearlock(s) from my wife as a Wedding Anniversary present, so am looking forward to trying those out. 6 plays needed to finish the challenge off.
The New and the Solo challenges also kicked on in July. Warhammer Quest meant that I’ve finally/definitely completed the 5×5 new games challenge, whether you count Marvel United X-Men as a new game or not. Oathsworn and Sentinels of the Multiverse each jumping to 4 plays from (virtually) nowhere broadened that one out as I see how high the new-game H-Index will go.
For the solo challenge, Warhammer Quest and Cloudspire clocked up 5 games between them to leave me on 80/100.
Next
August is going to be a month of disruption and changes. We’re away for several days with my parents and no internet, which is certainly going to be interesting, and I’ve also got the house to myself for a week, as my wife’s going to visit a friend, and Ned’s off to his grandparents (sadly it’s a week when I’m working full-time, which is why grandparents have been enlisted, but there should still be a few evenings in a row when I can hopefully get some serious solo gaming done.) As this is our first real year of school summer holidays (with no regular Nursery days to fall back on), it will be interesting to see how everything pans out.
I had a good feeling about June 2022. June was going to be when I finally got back on track with posting regular content, and got some good, varied gaming time in as well.
Then my wife got Covid
Then I got Covid
Then my son got Covid (at least he didn’t have symptoms, but he did have to stay off school whilst we were trying to recover, and could have used the sleep/rest of not having to look after a 5 year-old).
We got better and got let out – then a day later, my son started vomiting so badly that I ended up spending a night in hospital with him. There’s a good few days which are just a blur, because I’d had so little sleep that I just can’t remember properly what happened.
We staggered through to July just about starting to feel like life was returning to normal, but things had definitely been disrupted. Looking back, there were still a decent number of games played, but the total number of hours of gaming was way down (more than 20 hours down on May, and 8 hours less than February which had previously been the lowest total). After an impressive 41-month run, Dungeons & Dragons fell off of the “played every month” list, leaving only Arkham LCG (60) Marvel Champions (33) and Carcassonne (25) that have been played every month for over 2 years.
Let’s see what details I can remember.
New Stuff
Most of the new games that I played were already covered in the UK Games Expo roundup.
I did receive a couple of Kickstarter deliveries at the very end of the month – core game for The Librarians, and the second/final instalment of Sword & Sorcery. The Librarians was a little over a year late, having failed to meet the wildly optimistic 7-month fulfilment timeline set out when the campaign launched in October 2020 (back when people thought that all the impact of Covid would just go away and life would return to normal…) Sword & Sorcery Wave 2 was arriving a record-equalling THIRTY MONTHS LATE, and a new record-setting FIFTY MONTHS from when I ordered it. I know that at least the final wave of Shadows of Brimstone Adventures is likely to smash that record, but not for another year or so. I’m not too bothered by The Librarians having taken its sweet time, as I didn’t actually have to pay for my copy (I won/was given it by the creator, having helped him out with some playtesting during the design stages), and it’s not like we’ve gotten past the first 2 or 3 episodes of the show that we watched back in 2020.
On the way out?
I also attempted to sell some stuff in June. Interestingly, the only things that actually moved were the newest products – Final Girl, The Everrain, and a HEXplore It expansion that I’d picked up, hoping that it would be more compatible with what I already had than it turned out to be. Final Girl felt like a decent enough game, but to be honest, the main reason I got it was because of the limited range of things available to spend my show credit on – it’s solo only, and I’m not a great aficionado of classic horror films, so with so many other things that want my solo gaming time, I decided to sell whilst it’s still hard to get hold of, and would fetch a decent price.
The Everrain was a game that I was quite excited for in 2018 when I backed it, but had long since lost interest as the endless delays stacked up, filled with months at a time of silence, and implausible excuses for why it was taking so long. It finally arrived earlier this year, but still missing was a decent rulebook. I played it a few times, but ultimately decided that I had no interest in spending the many hours that would have been needed to get to a point where I was playing it regularly, never mind enjoying it.
So, what actually got played?
As is often the answer, Marvel Champions was the dominating feature – 19 sessions as (amongst other things) I finished a solo play-through of the campaign in the Sinister Motives box, using a Ms Marvel Aggression deck. I think this box is in a really good place – Campaign Mode in particular is pretty tough in solo, even on standard, but it is beatable, and certainly a lot less NPE than the darker days of Galaxy’s Most Wanted.
There was also a fair amount of Marvel United: my wife has been greatly enjoying the new Ms Marvel series on Disney+ to the point where I not only got her to read the first collected volume of the comic, but she was also actively suggesting games of MU so that she could play as her. We even saw Ms Marvel hit the table in Marvel Legendary.
Moving away from Marvel, the other 2 co-op LCGs both got played – a couple of solo games for Lord of the Rings, and resuming some of our multiplayer campaigns after a lull for Arkham LCG (although we did miss the epic multiplayer Machinations Through Time due to Covid, so now need to decide whether to wait even longer, or just bite the bullet and play it in standard fashion…)
Death!
June also saw a good amount of table-time for Cthulhu: Death May Die. Despite being a fairly easy game to introduce to new players, the fact that this arrived at the very end of 2019 and the ensuing 2 years of restrictions and lockdowns meant that we’ve played this very little above 2-player. My wife and I have been taking on Dagon with Bert and Ernie (aka Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemmingway), but Dagon scales in quite a punishing fashion against low player-counts, and we upped it to 4, which gave the campaign a bit of well-needed impetus. We also played a couple of 4-player games with a few friends, which brought up the obvious question: in a game with a core-box playable character who is Rasputin, how had we gone 2-and-a-half years without a Boney M soundtrack and people sat-down-dancing along?
A Question of Balance
June also saw quite a lot of Animal Upon Animal, as we finally convinced Ned that actually trying to make the stack of animals taller was a good idea, rather than going out of our way to knock them down as quickly as possible. It was a fairly good month for his games in general, with Snug As A Bug In A Rug, Monza, and Cobra Paw all getting played.
Half-Time
It’s the mid-point in the year. From a challenges perspective, things are looking pretty good, but it felt like the value short-fallers list might be overdue a bit of scrutiny.
To clarify, none of my games are really missing the mark in terms of £5/hour or better for THIS YEAR – aside from where that money has gone on not-yet-fulfilled Kickstarters (I’m only at about 10 hours of play on Too Many Bones, despite having spent £150 on finalising the Unbreakable Pledge Manager, but hopefully I’ll hit the 30-ish hours pretty speedily once the stuff actually arrives “this autumn”) – there’s also Warhammer Quest, for which I’ve still only played the tutorial a couple of times, but it only cost me a tenner.
So, what are the real culprits then?
Marvel United (X-Men) – Marvel United is a game that I consider a great success: played 120 times in just under 18 months, for something approaching 40 hours is really solid. That said, across the 2 Kickstarters, it’s also something that I’ve sunk A LOT of money into. If you measure it by player-count, or if you factor in painting time, then this is already beating £5/hour, but it still has some way to go for the me-only-gametime-only figures to get there.
Massive Darkness 2 – Massive Darkness is another one that came as part of an enormous Kickstarter, but again, it’s one that I would consider a big success, and which I’m more often thinking “why didn’t I get more of the exclusive bits during the campaign?” than “why did I spend so much?” about 17-and-a-half hours, 15 sessions, the hourly rate is somewhere around £12/hour, and there’s a 3-figure deficit, but I’m confident of getting there in due course.
Sword & Sorcery – honestly, this feels like my biggest white elephant. A £180 game that’s still got a 3-figure deficit a year after it arrived. I have gradually been playing it a bit more, and despite the rules definitely lacking something in terms of accessibility, it’s becoming a smoother, and more enjoyable process. That said, it’s a multi-hour game, and I’ve yet to play it anything other than solo. I think that this summer will be make-or-break for the game: with teaching basically over for the year, this is the optimum time to spring something new on my wife, and if she doesn’t start playing it between now and September, then I probably really need to look at whether I can really justify the money or the shelf-space for such a long, crunchy solo-only game.
Nemesis Lockdown – Nemesis is another game that has struggled for traction since I got it. I was about ready to sell it until I realised that I was making a crucial rules error, and a less-obvious tactical error that rendered it nearly unplayable, and definitely enjoyed my most recent play more than others. That said, it’s still punishingly difficult: does Zombicide Invader offer that Aliens-esque vibe in a way that’s a better fit for our group?
Cloudspire – Aside from things I pick up at shows, I rarely make impulse purchases these days, but this was definitely one, bought when I was feeling particularly fed-up in a long period of “turned out not to be Covid, but still stuck in the house for a week” last year. I’m definitely not a fan of the way the rulebook essentially requires you to learn the competitive version of the game before you can try the solo or co-op. I had one thoroughly disastrous attempt to teach this to my wife, where I made a rule-error that basically meant that there was nothing to do on the first few turns. I am still playing it solo, and gradually chipping away at that deficit, but not getting proper co-op time is definitely hampering it.
Just the dice of Roll Player (L) and the Monsters and Minions expansion (R)
Roll Player – Roll Player was a game that I’d had my eye on for a long time: it was going to be my take-home from working a show last year (or possibly even the year before, Covid makes me lose track of time), but that ultimately provided impossible due to supplier issues, and I ended up forking out cash for it in a pre-Christmas sale (technically it was a Christmas present from my wife). This is another game that has been 100% solo up until now, but that was much more my plan when I got it, so no particular complaints there.
I think that a large part of the problem with Roll Player is that the ratio of “cost in £” to “amount of gameplay in the box just isn’t that great. I don’t think the price is unfair from a components perspective, but the broad consensus is that you need the expansions for it to really become enjoyable, which involves a significant further outlay. I did at least manage to pick up the expansion with some store credit, so have been able to take on some Minions and Boss enemies without pushing this further into the red.
Unfathomable* – for the sake of completeness, I should note that Unfathomable is technically still in the red. However, it’s only 73p in the red, and when looked at by-player, it’s miles ahead of the £5/hour mark, so I’m really not too bothered.
As well as the un-played games, there’s also the 2022 pile of shame, which is looking worryingly large: 35 games that didn’t hit the table in the first 6 months of the year. That does include 5 random Expo review acquisitions, but still the other 30 are a bit of a concern – that would be a new record, ahead of the 28 un-played games in 2015, whereas I’d managed to keep the total in single figures ever since. A few have already been listed for sale, without much success, but I definitely need to decide soon whether to have a much larger-scale clear-out, or whether to start pushing some of the shorter, filler-length games that have largely been supplanted by Marvel United.
Challenges
All of the gaming challenges that I’d set myself for 2022 are in decent shape. With Death May Die reaching 10 plays, there are just 3 games in the 10×10 Hardcore challenge that still need playing: Journeys in Middle Earth, Lord of the Rings LCG, and Too Many Bones. With half the year gone, they’ve all had at least half the required plays (5 for Journeys, 6 each for the others) so remain on track.
Only 1 more qualifying play in my solo 10×10 challenge, as Cloudspire went up to 7 sessions, but this is on 77/100, so again, I’m not too worried about hitting the 100 by year’s end.
June also saw me finally hit 10 new games for the year. Strictly speaking, it’s only a 5×5 challenge, which has (probably) already been completed (it depends slightly on how you count it) but things are still looking good for pushing the new-game H-index as high as possible.
Next
why is the shipping box so big??
Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood missed a June delivery by a single day, so that will be something to get my teeth stuck into for July. I expect that this might also be when we see SP//DR and Spider-Ham for Marvel Champions.
Beyond that I’m not sure Trudvang Legends and HEXplore It: Domain of Mirza Noctis are still somewhere in the aether. I think that Trudvang isn’t expected to dock until the very end of the month, so is much more likely to be August, but the situation around HEXplore It is a bit murkier – supposedly arrived in the country mid-June, and is just waiting for Zatu to start dispatching it, but I’ve heard other mutterings that it might be stuck at Customs. Either way, plenty of other things to keep me going if it doesn’t appear any time soon.
fistfulofmeeples 