Zombies in space

Was a sceptic but...

OK when I saw the Kickstarter for Zombicide Invader I was actually wondering how this would work out as I did not think there could be zombies in space.

Well it turns out it was not zombies but xenos or aliens. Then I was like "OK no, you can't have a Zombicide game with aliens... I mean they pushed the limit when they had the orcs so I was not sure I even wanted to go near this game.

 Well a few months after the game came out in store, I found in on sale at a convention and said "Why not give it a chance?" and it turned out to be one of my favorite Zombicide games so far.

New Concentrated Fire makes all the difference

So they added this new rule that makes it so much easier to actually beat this game. You can actually concentrate your fire to add up the dice results to give you more chances of defeating an abomination. You don't need all the best weapons to survive, just a good roll of the dice.

Xenos instead of Zombies?

Like I mentioned above, they changed the zombies to aliens or Xenos. These aliens are awesome looking and I have spent the last 3 weeks painting all the miniatures.

So instead of walkers, runners and fatties there are workers, hunters and tanks. Also, the tanks DO NOT spawn with two workers like the fatties used to spawn with two walkers.

Is this version easier?
In short, YES... I had some friends come over and play a hard map and we actually won the game, that did not happen too often in the past with the other versions, we would easily get overrun by zombies because there would be abominations that would spawn and we could not get rid of them unless we have the weapons to do it. We also noticed that going up levels is not that bad since you get some really good powers to go along with the levels.

Spawning!
So another nice addition or removal, is the fact that there are NO actual doors to open in this version of Zombicide. You don't have to use an action to open a door and then like in previous versions, you don't have to spawn zombies in each room where you opened the door. So again less to deal with... however, the spawn cards do have a little more xenos on them to add to spawn zones.

Other additions:

Like I mentioned earlier, there are no doors; well in some maps there are locked doors that can be opened with an action but usually come with a price (like a new spawn zone). These doors can be a good way to stop Xenos in their tracks but it does not take them long to destroy the doors and keep on coming. Yep one action and the door is broken and if it is one that is locked by the map it triggers the effect.

You also start the game with 5 door tiles available to the players in order to close doors and divert, possibly, the incoming Xenos. You only get 5 so use them wisely. The Xenos then have to use their action to break the door.

They also added some nice new Bots and Sentry Guns for your heroes to use on the map. Once you gain control of these bots or guns, either by finding a specific objective or by having it as an ability on your survivor, you can use your actions to eliminate Xenos from a distance.

Good or bad changes:

Line of sight really changed in this version of the game. Inside of buildings you can only have line of sight to rooms adjacent to the room you are currently in and only if there is a door. That can make things get tricky if you are trying to take on many Xenos that are further away. There are some corridors in the buildings but they are rare. However, when mold forms it does destroy the walls and doors in that room and creates the line of sight for you (but make sure to mold spawn zones don't meet up or it's game over).

Outside you get your lines of sights, however, in Invader, you need oxygen tanks to survive outdoors and sometimes the rooms that provide these are either mold infested or far away so get there quickly (and these O2 tanks take up a spot on your inventory). In the Dark Side expansion you have dark zones and unless you have a flashlight, you cannot see past the area you are in.

Soldiers and Civilians:
So this new Zombicide introduces survivor types: Soldiers and Civilians. Soldiers start off with 3 armors points (or hit points, or health) and Civilians start with only 2. Some soldiers do start with 6 but I think there are only two that do that. Also, soldiers can only search in Security rooms (these rooms are red on the board) or if they have a search drone to allow them to search any room. Civilians, on the other hand, can search in any room on the board.

The Invader base game comes with soldiers that have white armor (I called them marines). The black Ops Expansion has six extra soldiers that have black armor and you can then play either Invader or Dark Side base games with up to 12 players by adding the Black Ops team. And in the dark side box, you get 6 soldiers that comprise the Green Squad and no civilians (I might add civilians as a choice for this game as it might vary the game a bit more I think).

However, there is one downfall of playing with the back ops, for every 2 players over 6 you have to add one new spawn zone.

Verdict:
Overall, I really enjoy this game and painting the actual miniatures has been so satisfying as well. The game is more fun and gives a chance at winning. I would recommend using the concentrated fire in the Black Plague / Greeen Horde versions of this game to help with the difficulty of that version.

The maps they give in the rule books are fun to play but I think it will be a real challenge to create my own and play them. I definitely recommend this game to anyone who has played the previous versions and were on the fence about this one like I was.

All in all I give this a 4.5 out o5.

Thanks for reading... Until next post.

Smells like... victory!

Who will be the most successful perfumer?

Parfum takes the players to the wonderful world of fragrances. Using ingredients like vanilla, lavender or violets, the players distill precious essences in order to create unique perfumes. Only the player catering to their clientele's preferences will be able to sell their perfume. Each customer favors a specific fragrance which must be contained in a flask to induce them to buy it. 

A dash of dice rolling, a hint of acquiring and selling and add a bit of backstabbing and you have one great game... that I did not think guys in general would have liked to play (what a stereotype). In fact, most of my gaming buddies are guys and they really enjoyed this game...

Here is a quick run-through of how the game works...

You start off with a player board (where you will store all the perfumes you are about to create) and you grab three water droplets (which will be used to change the face of your die or gain points at the end of the game - more on this later).

Randomly, you will take all the players point trackers and place them one by one on the '0' piled on top of each other. This will determine start order for waking up (yep, like Fresco, you have to wake up and choose how many actions you will be performing today) - whoever is on the bottom will pick first and so on...

There are three phases in this game:
First phase is to wake up (which I mentioned above) - the person that is last in score track points gets to wake up first and pick in what order he or she will play. The earlier you start a round the less actions you have but waiting to go last could mean that all the good ingredient dice are already gone or there are no essences left to create.
Once everyone has picked their turn order makers, the player with the first turn will begin with 3 actions... onto our next phase...

Action and Distill phase:

Depending on how many actions you have, you can choose to do one of the following: Take a die (ingredient), take a water droplet or add a new essence to the row if there are missing some (you randomly choose one from the bag - which is included - and place it on the board.

Now you roll all the ingredients (dice) you collected and with the help of water droplets you can modify the die face if it fails (see picture on left). One droplet lets you re-roll one die while two droplets lets you simply change the face of the die to the side you need (probably to the successful side - the one with the bottle on it). Also note that certain ingredients have a better chance than others to get a successful distillation. And this is also where you might want to think about taking away dice from future players that might want to create an essence found in the middle row of the board.

Once you rolled and re-rolled or changed the face of a die, you can now create an essence...

On the front of the tile you will see what type of ingredient you need to create that essence, if it is a top, middle or bottom part of a bottle and how many coins it is worth (points).

If you have the right combination of dice, then you can acquire this essence and place it next to your player board (on either side if it is a top or bottom and on the right if it is a middle). The point of placing these essences is to create a perfume and if you have either a two-level perfume or a three-level perfume you will receive a number of flasks to sell at the next phase of play. Note that once you have placed an essence next to your board you can not move that essence to the other side or to finish off another perfume in front of you... you can have 5 bottoms of perfumes but you will need tops and middles to be able to complete the perfumes in order to sell them.

Now let us sell these perfumes shall we... on the top of the board there are buyers that are looking for perfumes with their favorite fragrances in them...
For example, one lady would like a perfume with a scent of at least two lavenders (now depending on what essences you used and if you have completed perfume bottles, you can sell one flask to that person and collecting the coin value on the tile). That person will leave the board and the next turn order player will then sell one of their flasks if they have any and if they meet the fragrance requirements... if they do not, then they pass to the next player until it comes back to player 1 who can then sell another flask if possible.

The game continues like this until one of two things happens... you have no more essences to take out of the bag and place on the board, which ends the game immediately, or the last round marker comes out from the buyers pile and you have one final round to play the game. Player with the most points wins...

Ok so what do I think of this game... well when I do a completely walkthrough of a game it usually means I understand it and I like it a lot... so this game is no different. I really enjoyed this game, even more than Fresco and Scoville. I like the different varitions of game play as each turn the players play in different orders (hopefully) and that taking dice away from other players makes it harder for them to score - but watch out, being the first place in score means that you wake up last and often means going last... ok you get more actions but if you have absolutely no dice to work with well your lead will leave quickly.

I have only played this game with four players, I think it would be cool with 2 or 3 as well and the board has two sides for this change in players.

The quality of the pieces and board is great and the graphic artwork is really nice... plus the game has a bunch of dice...

Really recommend this game to anyone and I give this 5 out of 5 flasks of perfume.

Create legendary stories for your Elysium.

'Mythic Greece. As an upstart demigod, you want to earn the favor of the Olympians and become a figure of legend yourself.  Gather heroes and powerful artefacts, please the gods and bear their power to write your own epic tale.

Let your allies achieve their destiny and enter the Elysium, home of the glorious and the brave. Once the stories are written, only one demigod will be chosen to stand at the side of Zeus.

Elysium is a game of set collecting and combinations in which players recruit cards representing heroes, items, powers and gods. These cards have many different powers and you can create powerful combination to earn gold (the help of the gods) and victory points (the favor of the gods). Each card belongs to one of the eight Olympians gods (a family), and shows a level (1 to 3).

During the five turns of the game, players will try to transfer their cards to the Elysium and write their own Legends, which are series of cards from the same family or from different families of the same level. The more epic the Legends, the more favor from the gods they’ll earn. But as they go to Elysium, most cards lose their power and players will therefore have to renounce some of their combinations !

A game of balance and opportunity with  simple action, but constant dilemmas and complex strategies.' (source: http://www.greatboardgames.ca/elysium.html)

I am not going to get into how to play the game, instead have a look at the video below:

 

 

Hope you enjoyed that video... onto the review of the game. First I have to say I LOVE the box; I mean it looks like a Greek pantheon and everything has a place (well almost). The artwork is amazing and the durability of the card stock is very rigid and is going to last a long time of gameplay. The only down side is that there is no room for future family expansions.

 

If you have played Abyss (review coming soon), which I did and loved as well, you will love this game; it is very similar in game mechanics but with a Greek theme instead of an underwater theme.

I started getting away from your typical deck building games to start playing this sort of deck building game where instead of collecting cards to play again later, you collect cards to create legends and gain end-game points or even use the card's abilities while they are in your main area (until you transfer them).

 

The first few times I played this game, other players seem to have a hard time with the 'paying' method... you need a certain colour to purchase a card, but you don't have to use that color to 'pay' for it... but after a while they started seeing the methodology and everything came together for a great gaming experience.

 

The replay value of this game is great as you have 8 families to choose from and 5 get chosen to play each game. Each family has themed abilities that benefit that family however, there are some abilities that are repeated in each family but combined with other families can mean a great deal of end game points.

There are two families (Ares and Apollo) that have some extra flavour to them: Ares will add the prestige points (which they call PP points) and Apollo has the ability to see future cards with the help of the oracle. Also the more players you are, the more cards there are to purchase from the lineup of cards and better quests to fulfill. Also having different turn orders almost every round makes things very interesting.

There are a few card combos that could cause the game to become broken but other than that this game is really fun and easy to learn.

4.5 Dice out of 5

 

 



It's all fang and games 'till dawn!

A vampire game that actually follows the true nature of the vampire... suck blood all night long before dawn appears to kill you.

TILL DAWN is really simple to learn and fun to play: it plays over three rounds and the point is to collect (suck) as much blood as you can before dawn (and dawn can show up really quickly if the wrong cards are drawn too soon in the round).
Here is what you get in the box (coffin):

Your main deck of HUNT cards (where things like drinking blood will occur at different areas in town, or a vampire slayer will appear to hunt you down and try and kill you, a werewolf will also appear and could potentially kill you as well or invitation cards that allow you to bet on what the next card will be and if correct, gain more blood, or be incorrect and lose life).

You also get an event deck that is used when a HUNT card shows up with a cross on it; some of these events can be used immediately or in the future (before the game ends of course).

There is a third, power, deck where each player receives one random card from this deck, at the start of each round, to use during the round (at the end of round, all power cards are re-shuffled and given out again to each player for the next round).

You get character boards that have the number of lives they have (all 5) and an area where they like to hunt the most (which also gives one extra blood if that location comes out in the hunt deck) and then some flavour text. You also get four 5 voting cards for invitations (one of each type of moon that appears on hunt cards and one to reject the invitation - which costs you one blood to do so).

You get a bunch of blood tokens (but if you run out the round ends) and coffin tokens (which you trade in you blood tokens for at the end of each round and these are used to count the final points at the end of the three rounds).

Game play is very simple... starting with the oldest player, the player takes the top card of the HUNT deck and reveals and all players either gain blood equal to the amount shown plus an extra one if the favourite hunting ground is shown for the character or loses life or decides to participate in the invitation or move the dawn token forward or backward on the top of the box (yes the box is used as the time tracker).

Once the card is resolved, the players, starting on the left of the current player, get to decide to stay awake or enter their coffin (unless a couple of sun rising cards have show up early, this will not happen too fast in a round). If the player enters their coffin, they flip their character card over and retain the blood they sucked (gathered) to trade in for coffin tokens at the end of the round.

Then, the next player takes the Hunt deck and reveals the next card and this continues until everyone is asleep in the coffins, or the blood tokens run out or the sun rises (which any vampire still awake immediately dies and loses all the blood they collected - a player will also lose all blood if they die during the round because they lost all their lives).

A new round begins and the next oldest player starts the round and everyone comes back to life for more blood-sucking fun.

This is a great party game and a great filler game between long games... I really recommend it. The artwork is really well done and the game stays true to the actual vampire nature.

5 out 5 fangs.

It's a splendid thing playing Splendor.

In Splendor, you are trying to attract the attention of the nobles by having the most production of a certain type of jewel. Right out of the box, the game is amazingly detailed; the tokens are like poker chips and very durable and the card designs are super. It is a great starter game for new players and very easy to learn.

Here are the basics of the game:

Here is the layout, there are three decks that come with the game; I would class them as green is cheapest to purchase, gold is a tad more expensive and blue is very expensive but worth it and then there are the nobles on the top row and the 'chips' on the bottom or to the side.
You draw out four cards from each stack and place on the table along with a number of nobles that equal the number of players at the top.



On your turn you can do 1 of three things: you can either take three different chips of different colours or take two of the same colour, as long there are at least 4 left in the pile (be careful, if you have more than 10 chips at the end of your turn, you will have to give up half your pot); you can purchase a card or you can reserve a card (which means that if you see a card you think you can purchase soon or you think someone else will need that card, then take it in your hand (maximum of three) and take a 'wild' chip as well.

I am going to go trough all the rules of this game, so I will just get to the review. Like I said, visually this game is awesome, as for replay value well it does have some replay value as the nobles are always different each game and the cards that come out of each stack are also random each time. I also said this was easy, well, I believe, the instructions are like 3 or 4 pages in total. This is a fun game and I did play it a lot with my gamer friends. It is a good game for tournament play as well and could have an expansion added to it down the road but the game as it is, is just fine.

If you have a chance to play this game, then do so, you will not be disappointed.

4 dice out of 5