What on earth possessed me to get a dice game? Those of you who’ve read some of my previous posts will know that dice and I simply don’t get along. From Necromunda to Risk to Snakes and bloody Ladders, dice love to troll me to the maximum possible extent. It must, therefore, have been a moment of true madness when I picked up Elder Sign, an Arkham Horror offshoot from Fantasy Flight that is played with cards and dice. Dice! What was I thinking? Well, as you’ll no doubt be aware I’m a fan of the Lovecraftian mythos. I’m also a big fan of Fantasy Flight’s take on it via Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness. It seems like a logical step to grab another Lovecraftian game, right? …Right?

Elder Sign is a co-operative game for one to eight players in which you take the part of an investigator attempting to stop a Great Old One – a horribly powerful creature from another dimension – from breaking in to our world. You do this by collecting spells, items and clues, by defeating monsters and by searching for the mythical Elder Signs which will allow you to seal away the Great Old One for good. So far, so Arkham Horror. Indeed, if you’ve played Arkham Horror or Mansions of Madness you’ll instantly recognise the playable characters and their accompanying artwork. You’ll also be familiar with the notion that each of them has a stamina and a sanity rating.

Where Elder Sign begins to differ from its big brother is that it’s a much more focused setting.

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Pre-revolutionary Cuba! An interesting place, it would seem. When you mention the country the first thing that pops in to your mind is the name Fidel Castro, but what about before? What about that fascinating period between independence from Spain and the adoption of communism? My historical knowledge concerning that part of the world isn’t great but I recently played a board game that made me want to change all that. Isn’t that marvellous? A board game that is essentially moving little pieces of wood around on beautifully painted pieces of cardboard kindled an interest in history. It was released in 2007, it’s published by Rio Grande Games and it’s called Cuba.

In my previous entry I mentioned that I would be having a board game weekend. I have a lot to show and tell from those two days, but I think Cuba was the biggest surprise. I had never heard of it, and when the board was unfolded and the pieces distributed I raised my eyebrow in suspicion. There’s a lot going on on that there board.

As confusing as it appears initially, there’s no denying that the board is decked in lush, rich colours and this extends to all of the cards and components and even to the game’s box. “A game of cigars, rum and power,” the tagline proclaims, and that summary certainly matches the game’s wonderful visual aesthetic. As the owner of the game remarked, there’s generally no excuse for producing an ugly title these days, but Cuba possess a unique and stand-out feel.

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Promising to be even darker and more intense than that time you put too much Aluminium foil in the Hydrochloric acid during Chemistry class, Fantasy Flight’s Forbidden Alchemy should be with us in the next few days. An expansion for that Really Good Thing(tm), Mansions of Madness, it adds four new investigators, two new monsters and three new stories for you to play through. There are a number of interesting mechanics being introduced, including the fact that failing the alchemy puzzles causes your character to draw a side effect card that could result in horrible mutations and other grizzly things. There’s also the possibility of travelling through time to both the past and future during the course of one of the stories. Fascinating, Captain.

Sadly, one of the new investigators is Dexter Bloody Drake, so he can sod off – but one of them is a favourite from Arkham Horror, the stern and effective Carolyn Fern, who can hold on-the-spot interventions during the course of a game to stop her fellow investigators from doing involuntary things. Even more tragic than the presence of Dexter Drake is the absence of the delightful Mandy Thompson, who we can only hope will be added in an upcoming expansion.

                             Soon, my dear. Soon (we hope).

I won’t get to try Forbidden Alchemy until after Christmas, but you can bet there’ll be a full review up once I get my trembling mitts on it.

In other board-gaming news, I’m happy to report that I’ll be having a bit of a board game bonanza with a few friends over the weekend where we’ll be playing a number of titles both new and old. This means that there will be reviews and battle reports to go up. There are a few I’ll be playing for the first time, including Greek Mythological war ‘em-up Cyclades, and I’ll be combining Fantasy Flight and Games Workshop (uNF) for the first time, as I look at Blood Bowl the card game and Death Angel. I’m looking forward to telling you, my cherished reader, all about them.

Sometimes backlash is a terrible thing. Don’t get me wrong here: I’m all for reasoned argument. You certainly won’t find me blithely accepting that something is good just because everyone else says so. The kind of backlash I’m talking about, however, is rarely reasoned and certainly not the curtain-walled bastion of choice it claims to be. You see, once in a while a Really Good Thing(tm) is produced. People look at the Really Good Thing(tm) and say, “My goodness. That’s a really good thing.” They might even buy it. They may tell other people about it. They could well go to an internet forum and write about it. Others look at the Really Good Thing(tm). They may agree with the first group of people. Sure enough, there are criticisms. Nothing is perfect, right? But still, when all’s said and done, it’s a Really Good Thing(tm). A generally positive consensus is reached. Heads are nodded in satisfaction.

But as that positivity is snowballing the backlash is waiting. It rears it’s ugly head and stares grumpily at the positivity. The kind of backlash I’m talking about hates positivity. It cannot abide it. With one powerful leap of totally unjustified criticisms and needlessly aggressive arguments, the blacklash lands with clawed feet directly on the snowball of positivity, crushing it out of existence. The backlash, satisfied in it’s mission to reduce every opinion to mediocrity, slinks away with a self-satisfied smirk. Later that night it cries itself to sleep in it’s cave.

Why am I going on at such length about this kind of backlash? Well today I’m going to talk about Mansions of Madness. And Mansions of Madness is a Really Good Thing(tm).

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I thought I would post a few photos of my Abaddon the Despoiler and his Chaos Terminator bodyguard. I painted these way back in 1996 when the first Codex: Chaos came out, so don’t be too harsh on them. I never finished the bases properly either, a bad habit which I should probably rectify now that I have the materials.

I always thought these guys looked so bad-ass. It was a simple paint job – not much more than a metallic silver drybrush over chaos black, but it worked.

I used a transfer for the Black Legion emblem on his shoulder pad there. There’s no way I’d have the skill to paint something that intricate, either now or in 1996. You can see this poor bloke has been through a lot in the intervening years. Some of the paint on his combi-flamer is chipped. I left all of my minatures at home when I went to uni, but since then they’ve been through several house moves and no matter how well you pack them there’s always a bit of damage. Nonetheless, he still looks pretty cool.

This guy was my favourite. The twin-linked autocannon was brutally primitive and just looked wicked.

Sorry this is really blurry. I’m trying to get better with this camera. Quite an imposing force though! I’d always feared Space Marine Terminators when I played against them and it was great to finally have an answer for them, albeit a slightly more primitive, much more evil version!

My first experience of Arkham Horror occurred when a dear friend of mine visited us from America. An avid board game fan, she was eager to try out anything and everything my wife and I could throw at her. During a trip to Forbidden Planet, we decided that we would give Arkham Horror a try since it was a co-operative game and we’d all heard good things about it on the geek grapevine. It came to dominate the trip. Though we dabbled in other board games while she was here,a lot of Arkham Horror was played. We had to keeping coming back to it.

We wanted to figure out what the best skills, weapons and spells were. We wanted to figure out the best strategies. Should I be at the shop buying new weapons or should I be hoarding clue tokens? Should I be trying to close gates or should I be fighting the monsters that roam the streets? And just when you thought you were finding the answers to these questions the game would throw a new monster at you, or a new event, or the weather in Arkham would change and throw your plans completely. It’s a game of decision making, a game of teamwork and a game rich in theme.

Since those early days I’ve played quite a lot of Arkham Horror with quite a lot of people and I’ve had the pleasure of observing several different patterns of behaviour. Everyone seems to approach the game in their own way but there are a few broader strokes that are common across players. Let’s take a (tongue in cheek) look at them.

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No it isn’t. It really isn’t. Sorry. Sorry for the misleading title. It’s just that it can be. Sometimes it can be an incredible, challenging, satisfying experience. Sometimes it can be a total, utter git. I’m talking, of course, about Arkham Horror the board game, first published in 1987 by Chaosium and then again in 2005 by Fantasy Flight. The title of this article was a phrase coined by my wife during a particularly savage session of this rough Lovecraftian diamond. Rather than give you a dull blow by blow recount of what happened, however, I’m going to tell you a story. That’s what the best games do, right? They create stories. Join me and read on.

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Below, lurking deep in the darkest depths beyond the forbidden ‘Read More’ section, you will find a video for the new Arkham Horror spin-off “Elder Sign”. The game is coming out next week. I’ll be covering Arkham Horror itself in a future entry but for those already familiar with the series this looks to be another slickly produced take on H.P. Lovecraft’s disturbing, tentacle filled universe.

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Today I was going to write up a battle report about the session of Battlestar Galactica that my wife, and a friend and I played today, but then I realised that since a lot of people here haven’t played this little beauty of a game, it wouldn’t mean much to them. “Hmm!” I thought. “What if I explain the game as I go?” Good idea. Except (spoilers!!!) I had planned to cover BSG as one of my last boardgames in my boardgame retrospective entries. “You’ll steal your own thunder!” I thought. Then I thought: “What the hell.”

The thing of it is that Battlestar Galactica is probably the best board game I’ve ever played. It’s not perfect by any means, and if things go wrong then in rare instances it can be boring and dull. For the most part, though, it’s full of tension, excitement, trickery, double dealing, heroism, derring-do and betrayal.

The game is based on a TV series. That TV series was based on another TV series from the late seventies. The abridged storyline is thus: Man creates robots called Cylons to serve. The Cylons rebel. They nuke all of the human worlds and humanity must go on the run. There are only a few thousand people left all together in this fleet, let by the last Battlestar (a big ass warship) called Galactica. They are constantly on the run from the Cylons, who doggedly pursue them in an attempt to complete their genocide.

The big twist? Cylons have found a way to make themselves look exactly like us.

If you’ve played Arkham Horror, or any other co-operative type board game before, the initial setup will be familiar to you. You pick a character, who has a bunch of skills and abilities, then the game starts to throw stuff at you. If you’re a pilot, you can get out in a fighter and blow up the Cylons from your ship. If you’re a politician, you can attempt to keep up the moral of the fleet with rousing speeches. If you’re a technician, you repair parts of the ship that get blown up. If you’re the Admiral, you can launch nukes. :D

Here’s a look at the board…

So you’re all working together. You’re all fulfilling your roles and backing each other up, fighting against the Cylon threat and trying to save humanity. We’re all in this together, right?

…right?

Wrong. Because one or more of you is a Cylon.

Depending on the number of players, one or two of you will be an enemy agent planted in the fleet, covertly working against the other players and trying to doom humanity. At the start of the game, a pool of loyalty cards is constructed, and one is dealt to each player. Not only that, but half way through the game, there is a “sleeper phase” and another sets of cards are dealt out, representing the fact that some Cylons didn’t initially know that they weren’t human. These cards are kept secret, and most of them simply say “You are not a Cylon” there are a couple, however, that say exactly the opposite.

If you’re a Cylon, your task is to carefully work against the human fleet. Sowing discord, deceit and sabotage, you’ve also got to be careful not to get too obvious with your evil, otherwise you might find yourself shoved in the brig. Better to plant suspicions on a human player and get them put in jail.

If you’re human, you’re trying to escape the Cylon fleet. But you know that somewhere among your fellow players a traitor is lurking. As resources dwindle and the Cylon ships close around Galactica, tension and paranoia flare up. Accusations and counter accusations fly back and forth. The Admiral might declare martial law and take the President’s power from her, or the President might use her political contacts to get the Admiral thrown in his own brig. Who’s the Cylon? It’s almost impossible to know for sure until they choose to reveal themselves.

That delicious tension is what makes this a fantastic game.

In a three player game like the one we had today, you get one Cylon. For most of the game, I was utterly convinced it was my friend. We had been trading insults and accusations all game. Turns out that my wife had been biding her time all along. We got to a really difficult and very important skill check (these are done as a group) right near the end of the game.

Me: “Aww wow. Tough one here. Jacks can you help out?”

Friend: “Not really, it’s outta my skill set.”

Me: “Yeah fair enough. Well I can throw in a bit to help… good job it needs piloting skill though, right Holly?”

Wife (playing a pilot character):”I’m not contributing to this skill check.”

Me: “Uhh… it needs piloting and engineering… you have those skills!”

Wife: (I could hear this face over the mic) ^_____________^

Me & Friend: ……fuuuuuuuu

Needless to say my friend (the President) then used an arrest order to throw my wife in the brig. By this time though we were utterly boned. All of our fighters were damaged, and the person good at repairing them was now in the brig and laughing at us. The ship was surrounded by enemies, who were picking off the rest of the fleet bit by bit. It was only be a real fluke of card draws and some lucky shooting that Jacks and I managed to finally jump the fleet away and win by the skin of our teeth.

Great fun was had by all.

BSG is easy to learn, quick to play, and a total blast. It has caused me to call in to question everything my wife has ever said but that’s a small price to pay for a couple hours of fun. ;)

It might have seemed like I had peaked already. After all, how could one do better than Hero Quest? Well, for a young lad who was big in to Star Trek, who had covered his ceiling in glow in the dark stars so that he could pretend he was in space at night, and who loved anything science fiction with a passion that was unstoppable, the best thing they could have done was take Hero Quest and put it in space.

Too bad they didn’t. OH WAIT. They did!

In 1990 UK based Games Workshop (we’ll be hearing more about them in the future let me tell you) and Milton Bradley teamed up again to do exactly that. They put Hero Quest in space. They called it Space Crusade, and I was in love.

To give the game some context, let me tell you briefly about the two main universes that Games Workshop deal in to this day. The first is the universe of Warhammer, and that is your basic fantasy setting. That’s what Hero Quest was set in. Then there’s Warhammer 40,000 (40k because it’s set in the year 40,000) which is the same but in space. Space Crusade, therefore, was my first taste of Warhammer 40,000 and oh, what a taste.

I was given Space Crusade for Christmas probably in 1991 or 1992. Somewhere around there. I was desperate to have it as soon as I’d heard about it. It was more expensive than Hero Quest and contained a few more pieces and therefore I viewed it as superior even before I’d gotten my hands on it. I was so excited when I unwrapped the box that Christmas. God, just remembering it still gets my heart going. My excitement only mounted as I opened the box and began to remove the miniatures from their sprue’s.

You must admit, it is a thing of beauty:

Interestingly, Space Crusade was never relased in America, unlike Hero Quest. No idea why.

Space Crusade replaced the Evil Wizard with the ‘Alien Player’ who was under command of a ‘bad guys highlights’ of the 40K universe. Since I owned Space Crusade and had read the rules, I was the Alien Player most of the time, and this suited me just fine. I loved the Orks (yes spelt with a ‘k’ this time to distinguish them from their olde worlde cousins) and the Chaos Space Marines (like the heroes, except EVIL) and I particularly loved the Dreadnought. The Dreadnought was basically a walking tank bristling with guns, and when you popped that down on the board the good guys would go “Oh fuuuu-“. Well, they wouldn’t actually swear because we were young innocent British boys but you get the idea.

Speaking of the good guys. Enter: The Space Marines. If I had to describe them in a short sentence I’d say they were single minded space knights. A space marine player was in command of an entire squad of Space Marines consisting of a commander (the model that represented you) and four regular marines. Armed with a variety of weapons (which you could select before the mission and plug in to the models! But basically if you didn’t take all the heavy weapons then you were pretty much dead before you left the boarding arm) they would board the alien ship and just blast the living crap out of anything that moved. This was my kind of game.

If that concept sounds rather simplistic, then yes it is, in theory. However, you had the same mission by mission structure as Hero Quest. The board changed every time. Each mission had a primary and secondary objective, as well as a set of special rules to keep things exciting. In addition, if you were fond of persistent gaming as we were, you could keep a record of how well you had done from mission to mission as either a Space Marine Commander or the alien player, and get additional benefits and wargear the higher you were up the ranks. Not too shabby for a boardgame pitched at ten year olds.

I think maybe this boardgame is where my obsession with always being the red guys started. If you’ve had the misfortune to play a game with me you know that if red is available then just don’t even touch it. I have to be the red pieces, it’s just the law. The only exception to this is that I like to play Colonel Mustard in Cluedo (or Clue as the Americans know it) rather than Miss Scarlet. Anyway, I digress. On the occasions where I got to play as the space marines, I always picked the red ones.

You see, there are three different squads of Space Marines (so the game could sit up to four players), each representing a different chapter. The blue guys were the Ultramarines, the yellow guys were the Imperial Fists and the red guys were the Blood Angels. I mean, based on the names alone which one was I going to pick? Sadly this was where another trend was started. The one where the thing I like the most is always the worst thing. My favourite race in an RTS? Always rubbish. That gun I like in Call of Duty? Noob gun. That character I like in that beat-em-up? Tier 3 at best.

Each marine chapter had a different speciality associated with it. The Blood Angels were good at killing stuff in close combat. Woo! That fits with my get up close and get stuck in philosophy I got from Hero Quest, right? Except… this is a game where the heroes have guns… and some of the aliens have four arms and razor sharp claws… hmm…

Yeah, close combat is not where the Space Marines want to be. Thus, my poor Blood Angels had to avoid the very thing they were best at. I considered it a personal victory when I out-scored another Marine player while using them.

Another thing this game had in it’s favour was there was no magic and no flipping elves to be seen anywhere. There weren’t even any of the 40k equivalent, the Eldar. Bloody Eldar. They did actually add the Eldar in an expansion pack, but I was having none of that. We do things proper in my Space Crusade.

I should probably say that I do get a bit of a sense of guilt when I talk about this game because, being as I got it when I was so young and also because it was used soooo much, it got kind of thrashed. And when I say kind of thrashed, I mean that I’d be lucky to get £2 for my old copy on ebay. But :D Ebay is where I got my nearly-new copy about a year ago. Now I have a copy of the game I love so much that’s actually playable.

The fact that my copy got so utterly trashed is a testament to how well loved it was among me and my friends. Even after we had gone on to ostensibly bigger and better things, we would still come back to Space Crusade.

You never forget your first love, and Space Crusade was that board game for me.