F@#$ Eldritch Horror Expansions

F@#$ Forsaken Lore
F@#$ Mountains of Madness
F@#$ Strange Remnants
F@#$ Under the Pyramids


Disclaimer:  I will be using game terms in this post.  If you don't know what I'm talking about read my review or look on Board Game Geek for the rules.

Board Game expansions are a mixed bag.

Quite often, expansions come about because the game is a hit and the publisher sees away to keep that wheel rolling.  I'm looking at you Settlers of Cataan and Carcassonne.

Sometimes, they address a problem with game play.  Race for the Galaxy's first couple expansions did that.  That's the only one I'm aware intimately, but there's gotta be several more examples.

And sometimes expansions keep the game from getting stale.  The Eldritch Horror expansions mostly fit into this category.




Forsaken Lore on the surface didn't add much.  The only big addition was Yig as the cosmic horror that needs to be defeated.  What it did, which was fantastic at the time, was add something along the line of 25% additional encounter cards.  I don't think the impact of this can be understated.  After only a handful of replays, I started recognizing Other World (gate closures) encounters by the title, and a handful more had me memorizing the more popular location encounters (Rome, Tokyo, San Francisco).

Expansion Rating 8/10.  I could have done without Yig (at this time) and double the encounters.  But a fantastic addition that didn't twist the core game into knots.








Mountains of Madness added the Antartica sideboard, two new bad guys (Elder Things and Ithaqua),  a Prelude deck, 8 new characters, unique assets and the adventure deck.  Plus more additions to the encounter decks.


Ok this was a big one and did change the game quite a bit.

From least to most impact on game play.

1. The Bad Guys.  Just the new villains.  They all have new wrinkles and keep the game fresh, but the core rules do not change.
2. The sideboard.  You either need to play the Elder Things as the bad guy or draw (or choose) the correct Prelude for this to matter.   It's crazy important with the Elder Things Ancient One, but just flavor otherwise.
3. Adventure Deck:  Again requires the correct Prelude card to play.  But a big deal when it comes up.
4. New Characters.  This is where it gets hard to parse the impact, because starting from now, all of these things really change the game.  Of the 8 new investigators, 5 are really really good.  Ursula Downs the explorer, has a ridiculously good passive.  Tommy Muldoon, the rookie cop, has the best starting weapon in the game.  Daisy Walker is a very good gate closer and is a clue generator.  Agnes Baker, the waitress, is surprisingly versatile.  Finally, George Barnaby, the lawyer,  provides decent support and has the ability to do other things besides supporting the team.  Ursula and Tommy get picked in our games so often that there's an argument to be made that this was the most impactful change.
5. Prelude Deck:  Some kind of bonus (or beneficial trade) to begin the game.  I don't think these are terribly well balanced; some preludes are way way better than others.  Some can turn out so well, that the game can be won before a single die is even rolled.  Those do depend on additional luck of the draw, but I've seen it happen.
6. Unique Assets:  These wouldn't even be worth a mention if not for tasks.  The unique gear and ally's, while potentially great aren't that great of a departure from the gear you can normally get.    Tasks are...well...tasks.  You accomplish something, and you add some counter to your task.  When you've gathered enough you can reveal what the task does.  These, like Preludes, vary wildly in effectiveness, but a well timed task can turn the game completely around.

Expansion rating:  9.5/10.    At this point, in my opinion, the game needed some help for the players, and Preludes and Tasks certainly offered that.  Also a 66% increase of investigators to play was very welcome too.  Two thumbs up, way up, on EH:MoM.






Strange Remnants was another smaller expansion, like Forsaken Lore.  It mostly just added to what was existing.    4 new investigators, and they were ok, but not Ursula or Tommy.  The usual addition of encounters, gear and bad guys helped a bit too and added additional wrinkles.  Plus a new adventure deck and a new encounter called "Mystic Ruins".  Both required the proper prelude card to play.  

Expansion rating 7.5/10.   More of the same really.  I like any and all additions to gear, encounters and events, so this is still definitely worth getting.   But the new ancient one and the mystic encounters deck was meh.






Finally, Under The Pyramids.  Expect an update on UtP in the future, as I have only played this once.  A new sideboard of Egypt, new investigators, a new mechanism called impairment, and more of everything else previously mentioned.

First impressions:

The sideboard of Egypt is much better than Antarctica.   There's multiple exits and 'free movement' once a turn.  I suppose the flavor of Antarctica is that it is supposed to be a desolate abyss that's hard to get out of, but I didn't find that experience particularly enjoyable.   I like that there are many things to do in Egypt and getting to the next thing to do isn't ridiculously hard.

The Cursed Reporter character looks really really fun.  He's a slow build up, but if you can keep from losing, he'll probably end up as the most powerful character on the board.   Without some kind of power combination though (through gear or whatever) it's going to take a ridiculously long time.

Impairment sucks, but it was totally necessary at this point of the games life.  Pretty much every previous expansion only added benefits to the players and not anything to additionally hinder them.  The pendulum had swung to the players side and some new difficulty needed to be added.  Impairment is anti-improvement tokens.  Instead of increasing your skill, it decreases it.

The Abhoth Ancient One was very entertaining.  Defeating cultists is now various skill checks determined by a deck, instead of grabbing the biggest gun and shooting them in the face.

Preliminary rating:  ~9ish/10.  I need replay but so far so fun.

F@#$ Libertalia

Two posts in a week!
What are you thinking?
Won't you get burned out again?
Will people still not care either way?

Libertalia

Libertalia is mostly a card game with some neat mechanics.  It's not overly deep, but it's paced decently well and plays at about 15 minutes per player.  30 minutes per with Juan.

Theme:  fairly well implemented, you can imagine this with another genre but the goal of gathering booty with your rogues gallery works quite well.

Game Play:  each player gets 9 identical cards to start the round of 6 plays.  In between rounds, you draw 6 more identical hands for each player.

Each round has 6 plays.  You place a card, resolve its effects, grab some treasure and move onto the next play.  But not everyone plays the same card at the same time, so hands will change!  In fact starting the follow up rounds, everyone has similar hands but its quite unlikely that any are identical!

During the round set up, someone added a bunch of treasure tokens for each of the 6 days of the voyage.    Each day you select a card to play.  Each card has some power that helps you: select moar treasure, is in addition to treasure, or what have you.  Each card has a numerical value, the higher the value picks booty first, the lower the value has it's Dawn effect first.

Wait, what?  Dawn effect?  Oh yeah, each day has three phases:  Dawn Dusk and Night.

Dawn - this is pre-select treasures.  A bunch of cards manipulate who selects and what during the dawn phase.

Dusk phase- this happens when you select treasure.  like maybe you don't pick any, or maybe you pick two or maybe you throw all but one of your treasures overboard.

Night phase - some cards have an ongoing power for every night.   Like gain 2$ every night this card is in play.

these are all represented by symbols on the card, along with a 4th end of voyage symbol.  Those effects go off at the end of the voyage.  Duh.

So the booty:  Some are good, some are meh and some are bad.  And in a turn without any card generated exceptions, you must select one.  So there is a reason for all those treasure manipulation powers.

(I am not google searching images for Bad Booty but I want you to be aware it did
occur to me)

So that's the game.  Play cards, select booty, repeat until end of voyage and follow the directions on the cards in the meantime.

The intrigue happens because quite a few cards are good if only you have them in play or need to make it to end of voyage amidst a ridiculous amount of rounds of people trying to kill your dudes.

So it is very much tactical and strategic, if not overly intellectual.

Review:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are things to like about this game.  

The interactions of everyone's cards are cool.

It's a pretty elegant design.

I'm just not convinced of how much fun it is.

And I'm fairly good at this game.  And by good, I mean I figured out good tactics really really early.  But the tactics are 'don't get greedy',  'look for cool interactions' and 'count cards'.  Literally every single player I play board games with can figure out the proper tactics after a game or two.

Maybe there's a deeper strategy I'm not seeing, like maybe there's cards that are way more advantageous to carry onto round 3, but it sure seems like that's a game to game decision.

Anyways, this is clearly not a favorite, but because it plays fast and doesn't last all night I'd keep it in semi-regular rotation.  It would also be a nice filler game at board game sessions with multiple tables playing different games.  

"You have an hour left? Ok Let's break out Libertalia"

F$%^ Star Wars prequels

It's not timely!
It's not unique given the flurry of other Star Wars' retrospectives!
It's not asked for!
and it's not well written!

But my review of the Star Wars Prequels!

When I first saw them, I absolutely hated them with varying degrees of malice.  Phantom Menace was atrocious, Attack of the Clones was perhaps a little bit better but still pretty bad, and Revenge of the Sith was the most watchable but that's a low fence to get over.

Years have passed and now I have mostly forgotten the details.  They didn't wreck my childhood memories, they didn't permanently tarnish the legacy of the first trilogy, and they didn't forever cripple future Star Wars endeavors.

What happened was the prequels were three sub-par movies that a lot of people saw.

So what happened initially?

If you follow this blog regularly, and you don't, because I don't actually post regularly, you'll see in movie reviews that I talk about 'conception' quite a lot.  And 'conception' in this context is the core story telling idea.  It's the ideas that are likely to stick after the script's first draft.

It's possible to have a pretty dumb idea lead to an entertaining movie but everything else needs to be fantastic.

Two examples:  Dodge Ball and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.

Basing a movie on the grade school game of dodge ball is ridiculous!  At best I was expecting a movie that had a tone of an overly long 'one joke' SNL skit.  It was surprisingly good, because it did not rely on people getting hit in the face with a big rubber ball for most of it's humor.  Vince Vaughn nailed the "Bill Murray Sarcastic Straight Man" and Ben Stiller was a hilarious heel.

In the late 90s, who would think a parody on the 60s spy genre would work as a movie?  But AP:IMoM hit the perfect irreverent tone   Mike Myers was great as both Austin and Dr. Evil and the supporting cast (down to Tom Arnold even) really sold the premise.

Chronicling Anakin Skywalker's fall and the rise of Darth Vader wasn't the dumbest idea ever, but Vader is not nearly the most interesting character in the prequels.  It's Chancellor Palpatine.

Star Wars at it's best borrows from the classics and history.  Imagine Star Wars Clone Wars as a retelling of the rise of Napoleon.  Or Stalin if you need to make the villain less ambiguous :).  This is just like my opinion man, but that sounds like a much better movie to me.

Furthermore, in an attempt to prop up the worse idea for the trilogy, ST:PM turned Vader into Space Jesus in a ham fisted manor with 'the prophecy to bring balance to the force' and the 'midi-chlorian pregnancy'; these utterly failed to make this story the least bit compelling.

The Scripts

I won't spend too much time parsing and nit-picking the scripts.  Red Letter Media and a host of other bloggers have more than adequately discussed the faults of the script.

My take on the scripts is that they all read as if every single brainstormed idea for a 'cool shot' made it into the final draft.  So excess time was spent on justifying why that cool shot was necessary instead of actual character development.

The Acting

It's almost impossible to separate the acting from the writing, but I think it's safe to say that Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman didn't give their best performances.

And finally, the CGI

sigh.

Yeah I hated the CGI.  Or more accurately the prevalence of CGI everything.

Someone I know from the interwebs once made a pretty good point.  Phantom Menace was a CGI pioneer.  It was an early example on what was possible.  Later movies really learned what can and can't be done with CGI; and the combination of CGI and practical effects can make a truly breathtaking movie.

So maybe, maybe, you can forgive SW:PM for being first through the wall but that in no way lets AotC or RotS off the hook for bland CGI backgrounds and cartoonish CGI characters.

So what does it all mean?

Sure seems that the Star Wars machine is steam-rolling on.  The Force Awakens opens this week and folks are already camping out in line.  The merchandising blitz has also reached fever pitch.

For me, Star Wars is no longer a must see.  SW:TFA needs to get decent reviews (~80% on Rotten Tomatoes) for me to even bother.  And there is no way I'm seeing it right away.   A couple weeks after the hysteria dies down is completely adequate.

hawk on my fence

pink spot on head

Squirrel?

Ken M believes a hamburger is a type of sandwich.

before and after hike

before hike

after hike

F@#$ Eldritch Horror

Boom headshot!  Back after two years with a game review!

F@#$ Eldritch Horror

Verdict first, because that is how I am rolling in 2015.

I really like this game, which when you think about it is surprising because

#1 - it's kinda an adventure board game.  Which I usually hate.  The wandering around shouting, "See my gun? Can you make it better?" added with the length required to play usually makes me root to be a traitor.  

But you're not exploring a dungeon here, the map is already revealed, and if you spend too much time making your gun better Cthullu will eat you.

#2 - It takes a long time to play.  Well unless you really blow it and concede the world to Yig.  But you should expect an hour per player.

But there's lots to do, and competing crucial tasks.  It stays interesting enough for the game run-time.

#3 - It's Cthullu mythos themed.  I am not a fan of the Lovecraft.  I mean, it's ok but not something I seek out.  Sometimes I feel that if HP Lovecraft took a dump, my friends would insist that it is actually an intriguing cosmic horror.

But while I am not a fanboy, I can appreciate good themes.  And Eldritch Horror delivers on that Lovecraftian Horror theme nicely.

The Plot

One of the Cosmic Horrors from the Lovecraft Mythos is coming to eat the world, and you are one of a handful of characters trying to stop the spawning.  To do that, you must close magical gates, fight eerie monsters and complete epic quests.

This feels like an end of the world story.  Things start slow but keep getting worse and worse.

This feels like a Lovecraft story; you may win, but there is always a price to pay by your psyche.

The Mechanics

There are 3 phases to the game, I don't have the rules handy so I'm making up my own terms.

These phases in order are:  Actions, Encounters and Events.

Phase 1:  Actions

These are the things the characters do.  Duh.

You rest up and heal, you can move to an adjacent space, you can buy a ticket so you can move farther later, you can try and acquire gear or you can "focus" and gain a re-roll asset.

Each character also gets an action unique to their character and over the course of the game you may gain gear that does actions too, like spells and such.

You get two of these, and you can't repeat actions.  So if you need to travel from Sydney to London, its going to take a while.

There's some other caveats.  Like you can't get gear unless you're in a city, you can't get a boat ticket unless you're in a port, and if there's a monster in your location you can't do much of anything,

Phase 2:  Encounters

After all the moves are completed, the table does encounters.  Encounters are mandatory, you can't skip if you don't wanna.  They are also based on your location.  This is also when fighting monsters occurs

Some encounters help you win (called mysteries), some encounters prevent you from losing (close gates), some encounters get resources (clues, some particular major cities, expeditions), some encounters help out the global picture (a couple major cities again) and some should be avoided (generic city, wilderness, sea spot).

Maneuvering to do the right encounters is pretty much the game.  You have competing goals here: you need to close gates because if you don't you lose, but you also need to solve the mystery because if you don't you can't win.  And you need to gather some resources because if you don't closing gates and solving mysteries might be impossible!  Fun!

Phase 3:  Events

At the end of every turn, the Empire Strikes Back

a variety of things happen.  Most of them bad.   

The time before the world devourer spawns may drop.  

More gates can spawn.  

More monsters can spawn.

Some new resource sucking event may linger (game term a rumor)  

Monsters may chase you, you might go crazy or that nagging leg injury finally catches up to you.

All of this is explained on a single card!

The point of all this is really to set everyone back.

Replayability

Very very high, especially with the expansions.   While a lot of the encounters get cycled through enough that they repeat, what's important to do changes with each big bad.  Some games clues are at a crazy premium.   Some games you got to kill lots and lots of monsters.  Some games you are overwhelmed with gates.  The world never ends the same way twice.

Strategery

The game changes WILDLY depending on how many people are playing, so these observations are mostly for 5 player; which I think is the hardest setting.

A balanced party seems pretty key.  You need critter killers and gate closers, and those tasks might be mutually exclusive.  Some support characters are nice, but too many of them means you don't have enough people actually doing things.

Clues and weapons are your most important resources.  Weapons, because otherwise it takes to long and you take too many hits killing critters.  Clues because closing gates, solving mysteries or any number of other mechanics require clues.  Clues are tough to get under normal circumstances.  It's a non-trivial encounter to gain a clue, so some kind of clue gathering engine also really helps.

Beware of personal improvement over party goals.  Gearing up your character when you could be furthering the quest tends to make you the best equipped hors-d'oeuvre.

snow dog