Alchemy Bytes #32: WINNING!

Following on from previous posting on the excellent Castle Panic, I decided to have a look over the Fireside Games website to see what else they might have to wet my gaming whistle.

Then I found this. A free print-and-play game of Sheenisms! WINNING!! A free game that I just had to share.

Although I do notice that Fireside Games have made yet another typographical screw-up (which is becoming something of a theme), labeling the web page as "Fireside Games - Bloodsuckers Card Game". Another one of their fine products, but nothing to do with Charlie Sheen.. I hope.

Still, typo's or no typo's, the products are still great, and that's the main thing. :0).

Alchemy's Wokbench #8: Kill The Monsters. Steal The Treasure. Stab Yourself In The Back?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am working on a way of playing the Munchkin card game solo.

This is largely because I am a HUGE fan of the product line (with a sizable collection to boot), but there just isn't the player base where I live, and I have to get my Munchkin kick somehow. Normally this would mean Munchkin Quest, which is a great game, but what about those times when you want to kick in a door, kill a monster, and steal his loot at 3am in the morning or, on a rainy day or, as is most common with our gaming group, when everyone else is on a different shift pattern to you?

It makes getting a game in nigh on impossible but there must be some kind of solution. Right?

Well, I am a firm believer that nearly ANY game can be played solo. You just need to take a good long look at it and then get creative! Munchkin was no exception. I also believe that when creating a solo play version of a game, it should mirror the original in its theme and goals, else what you are actually doing is creating a new game, using the same components.

The first thing I needed to do was concisely breakdown the goal of Munchkin, which I would describe as "Reach level X before your opponent(s) do". So by nature it's a race game essentially, which makes it amazingly simple to convert. It also makes it incredibly easy to tweak once converted to either increase or, decrease the difficulty. Awesome!

So without further ado, I present:

Munchkin: solo

Compatable with all major Munchkin releases.

 Components: Nothing beyond the norm. The solo version of Munchkin has been designed so that you won't need to raid your gaming shelf BUT, it does run on the assumption that you are playing Epic Munchkin (because what true Munchkin wouldn't want to play to level 20!?), so if you are using standard level counters, you may want to retire them in favor of a couple of D20's.

Set-Up: Before dealing yourself your starting hand, deal out six piles of ten Room cards in front of you, and directly below each of these piles, deal a pile of ten Treasure cards (for a grand total of 60 Room cards and 60 Treasure cards across 12 piles).

Flip the top card of every Room pile so that it is visible and, now deal out your starting hand.

Play: Munchkin is played normally with the following exceptions:

• When you would "Kick Open A Door" you instead choose to encounter the top card visible on any of the Room piles.

• If you do not encounter a Monster you may "Look For Trouble" as normal or, "Loot The Room". If you do so, the face-up cards on the top each pile are considered face-down for the purposes of looting the room (and for all other reasons during the game, they're flexible like that).

• If you are forced into "Charity", you simply discard the cards regardless of whom is actually the lowest level player.

• After the "Charity" phase, your opponent automatically gains a level and, your next turn begins straight away.

• Curses that would cause your opponent to lose a level still do so and may be played at any time but, curses that have any other effect other than reducing your opponents level, such as "Lose One Small Item", instead prevent your opponent from automatically leveling up at the end of your turn.

• For the purposes of all cards, you are considered to be alone and unable to ask for help.

Winning: The player wins if they reach level X before their opponent but, as with standard Munchkin, the last level can only be gained by slaying a monster.

Calm Before The Storm

Image Property Of Monster-madness.com

There's no two ways about it. Blogging wise, the past couple of months have been pretty slow ones.

By and large this is down to real life commitments, but I am hoping that I can start to turn that around. Fast. In the next 72 hours in fact! The thing is that, just because I haven't been able to update here as often as I would have liked, the ideas have still been coming thick and fast. REALLY fast.

I now have a new abstract game on the workbench, along with an independent survival-horror roleplaying game, heavily spurred on by the sterling work that Jerry Teleha has been doing with Stay Alive! On top of that there have been the usual gaming musings, a solo conversion for the Munchkin card game that I think's pretty dapper, my old solo rules for ZOMBIES!!! that I have re-discovered in a pile of print-outs, new plunder for the cave, new thrift store finds. There is a LOT to blog about, and I finally have the time to sit down and do it all justice. :0).

So sit back and relax, there's a storm coming. ;0)

Alchemy Bytes #26: WHEATON!!

Following a suggestion passed over a game of Dominion in my local gaming store, I decided to give Tabletop a whirl. I have to say, well worth a look, and I don't think that I recommend it highly enough.

Previously I have always thought of Tom Vasel, and The Dice Tower as my go to place for gaming info on Youtube. To be fair to Tom, he does put out good quality material on a regular basis, and if I am looking into a game that I may want to add to my own shelf, I'll probably still go there.

That said though, having now been exposed to the Tabletop, I find The Dice Tower somewhat laking. Wil Wheaton is a great showman, and his guests really seem to be having a blast. He's genuinely passionate about gaming and, the banter around the table rings far truer than the comparatively dry and clinical style of Tom Vasel. Speaking for seasoned gamers, I think that we can all agree that when a session really gets going, that inner-child evident in those gathered around the Tabletop in the video above is what really comes out.

Play Report: Shadows Over Camelot: The Card Game - Game #1, Quest #1

Well I have put a couple of posts up about it of late but, tonight marks my first time actually sitting down, breaking the seal and, playing me a game of Shadows Over Camelot - The Card Game.

Not having played the original board game, I couldn't tell you how they compare but speaking for the card game alone, I can say that it is well worth the money and, that despite the fact that I was playing solo, it was still tense.

For the purposes of a play report on a memory game, I decided to note down the cards once I had committed myself to a quest (because writing them all down as I went along would be cheating frankly). So here goes!

My first quest that I embarked upon was for Excalibur. It was a middle of the road quest, granting two swords if I was successful and I had seen a couple of high value Excalibur cards go down as I worked my way through the deck. I had seen a couple of high value Saxon cards pass too but Merlin effects where going to remove those (or at least so I figured), so this seemed like a fairly safe bet.

There was a Morgan card in play that forced me to count cards aloud as I played (which really messed with my mental count) but I felt pretty confident in my decision as her effects hadn't been in play too long and, I couldn't have lost track of what had passed by that much. Could I?

As it turns out, no, but it was close! One more point in the quest for Excalibur and it would have been a failure. Still, a win is a win and none of the other quests reached the failure threshold either, netting me two white swords and no black ones. A good start.

But what does the realm of Camelot have in store for our valiant knights and their new and shiny sword?

Dominion Defies Decryption

Fiendish Forces At Work And Play!

This is not a good thing! So with that in mind I will preface this post by saying that reading on may spoil your enjoyment of Dominion. If you want to live in blissful ignorance, stop reading now. If you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes, read on.


I mentioned in a recent post of my plans to created a home brewed deck-construction game based loosely upon Dominion but, with a Dungeon Keeper theme.

Initially I planned to simply "re-skin" a few Dominion cards that seemed to fit the theme of their Dungeon Keeper counterparts (for example I would have used the Torturer as the Mistress) to see how the idea would actually look on the table and play out within the limitations of the theme.

Before taking the plunge however, I figured that I would have a little dig into the mechanics behind Dominion to see what made it tick and, to give me some idea of the thought processes of the designer. You might say that I was planning to go method on this one.

That's when the problems began.

I was working from the assumption that if I looked deep enough, there would be some underlying mathematical relation between the cost of a card and the effects that it brings into play.

There isn't! At least not one that I could find.

There are patterns that can be found amongst certain groups of card that would lead you to think there is but, this soon falls through when you try to apply those constants to the make-up of another card.

As an example, I compared the Bazaar, the Market and, the Festival to try and find some relation between card costs, compared to the effects of the card. They were perfectly suited to the task as all three had a cost of 5 to bring into your deck and, between them, they shared all the major values that I needed and wanted to work out (Actions, Buys, Cards and, Coinage).

Through an algebraic process of elimination I was able to determine that when costing a card, Actions, Buys and Coinage shared a common value that I labeled 1, while a Card would cost you twice as much.

So, A=B=2C=$, where A=Actions, B=Buys, C=Cards and, $=Coinage.

This was at least true of these three cards but as soon as I tried to apply these rules to other cards such as Village, Laboratory and, Smithy, it soon fell through. So, as the rule couldn't be applied to any card it was no good at all.

Carrying on with my experimentation I have not been able to find any formula to tie it all up, which leads me to believe that there very well may not be one. This is both good news and bad news, with a sprinkling of interesting.

The good news, from my point of view at least is that I can completely scrap Dominion as a model for my project. I can take away the ideas sure but, I have no interest in designing a game that is unbalanced... Which brings me nicely on to the bad news.

I had thought Dominion to be a relatively well designed game but, now looking over my results and some of the more glaring mistakes that I had previously not given any thought to, I have to accept that this is not the case and, well, it's kinda ruined the game for me. Not in the sense that I will never play it again but, more that when I do, I won't feel like I am playing a fair game and fairness is very important to me at the gaming table. This lack of fairness though is to say the least a little intriguing.

Knowing what I know, I will now not only be able to build a better game myself but also some more interesting preset combinations for Dominion itself. I can search through the cards, find the cards that are balanced and put them together!

So, inversely as much as I have ruined my game, I have also taken it up a notch! You gotta love maths!!

Alchemy's Workbench #7: A Couple Of More Design Ideas

Whilst in recent times I have not had much time to work on the projects that I already have on the go, it certainly hasn't stopped me coming up with more. As it should be!

My two most recent musings both revolve around cards. One simple.. One not so.

My simplest idea is simply to maybe produce a Top Trumps deck or two. There are a lot of legitimate sets and clones already out there, covering nearly every subject that you can imagine but there are a few themes that I would like to explore, the Dungeon Master Champions for instance or, maybe something a little more imaginative. Any which way I do this though, I don't ever see this becoming a commercial or even independent release. Just something spun off the home printer but, it should still be fun none the less.

The second idea that I am toying with is a revamp and re-skin of Dominion with a Dungeon Keeper theme. Again, something that'll never be a commercial release (and never see the light of day beyond my close gaming friends because licensing would likely be a nightmare!) but should be fun to work on.

Initially I plan to simply swap the art on existing cards that best fit the feel of room or what have you from Dungeon Keeper before addressing the more tricky aspects of new mechanics and new victory conditions. All being well, what comes out the other end won't look any more like Dominion than any other game that uses deck construction as a mechanic. At least that's the plan.. Or as close to a plan as I have for the moment, considering I only dreamed the project up yesterday.

Then there is of course the fact that I already have more than enough on the go at once. Still, I would value any input on the matter. What do you all think?

Where's Your H.E.D.Z At?

Whilst putting together a few items for sale that I had in storage in the spare room (hopefully some day to become the gaming room once I shift myself into gear), I found my copy of H.E.D.Z, the Card Game.

Whilst outwardly appearing to be little more than a Top Trumps freebie clone (it came free with a gaming magazine), it does hold a secret.

Printed on the back of the back of the standard rules card is a variant, that with no modification, could be played with any set of Top Trumps or, similar cards. So, for your trumping pleasure, here's they are!

Setup

• Deal out 7 cards to each player.
• Each player selects five 'live' cards to play with.
• Remaining cards become the players draw pile.

Play

• Each player selects a card from their live cards.
• The lead player declares a category.
• The card with the highest value wins.
• The winner places his card and the losers at the bottom of their draw pile.

• If both values on a card are tied, both cards are placed centrally an the winner of the next hand also adds along with the losers card and, their winning card to the bottom of their draw pile.

• If you run low on cards and you are the lead player, you may pass control to your opponent to draw the top card of your draw pile to your live cards.

Winning

• You win the game if your opponent has no live cards left to play.

Fluxx Ups #1: Non-Creeper Feature

If there is one thing I love, it's a game that you can play with.

Not playing but, playing with. A game that really lets you dig into and make it your own the way roleplaying games encourage you to.

That's the way I see Fluxx.

With every set having identical backs, regardless of edition and handfuls of promotional cards, I can't help but see it as an ideal candidate for home brewing.

Which is what "Fluxx Ups" is all about. Taking bits out, putting bits in, and, seeing what happens.

For today's experiment I decided to take Martian Fluxx and see what happened if I stripped a deck of all of it's Creepers and, all of the cards that related to them (Actions, Goals, Rules etc). I had seen this written as a suggestion for easing in new players in another version. Zombie Fluxx I think But, what actual difference does removing the Creepers make?

It has to be said, not a lot.

I dropped 13 Creepers, 3 Actions, 2 New Rules, 6 Goals and, an Ungoal card and I didn't find that the game played that much differently at all. The only real change I noticed was that without Creepers the game is much more friendly.

Sure, you can still steal Keepers from one another, trash them occasionally and manipulate the Goals and New Rules to your advantage but, there is none of the negative impact of throwing a Creeper in front of someone just so that they can't win. In my book, that's just poor sportsmanship.

So it would seem that the impact of removing creepers is less a change in play but, more a change in the meta-game. A very positive one at that! So, if you're going to play Fluxx with younger audiences this is definitely something to consider doing.

Review: Fluxx

Looking for a game that you can play straight out of the box? That's ideally suited to gamers and non-gamers of all ages? You're looking for Fluxx.

When I say play straight out of the box too, I really mean it. Find the "starter" rule card in your set (Draw 1, Play 1), shuffle the remaining cards together, deal out 5 a piece and you're good to go. Now that's what I call games design!

No convoluted rule books, next to no tuition time for new players and, to top it all, Fluxx comes in a variety of flavors (Family, Eco, Zombie, Pirate, Martian, Monty Python, Stoner, Oz, Star and, Cthulhu at the moment).

Each set has a very distinct feel to it and there is nothing to stop you mixing and matching to create your very own deck. There are even promotional cards that you can throw in there to add to the fun. To boot, should you want to, collecting all of the sets won't see you out of pocket either.

As you have probably guessed by now, this game gets a big thumbs up from me and, if you don't already own it I highly recommend you pick up a copy.

Alchemy Rating: 9.5 out of 10.

Links

Fluxx Board Game Geek Entry

Fluxx on the Looney Labs Website

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