I've ripped on In Nomine in this blog before, and not without good reason. However, I have to admit that for everything about it that bugs me, there's a counterexample of some bit of cleverness oddly ahead of its time. The D666 system, for example, is almost comically simple (the only system I can think of with a more bizarrely simplistic pass-fail mechanic is baseline Conspiracy X), but it's almost as simple to explain to people as Over the Edge and, I'll admit, enjoyably thematic. The power disparity between humans and angels has bothered me in the past, and the system is rather easily broken, even with the fan patches that fix the most egregious abuses, but if there's one lesson I would teach myself in junior high, it would be "For Christ's sake, make some actual female friends". But if I had two lessons to teach, the other would be "And stop wearing sweatpants". But if/when we get around to the gaming-related wisdom of experience, bullet point one on slide one is "Don't bother gaming with people who put their character's power level and breaking the system ahead of telling a good story". And for all its flaws, IN told some damn fine stories.
One element of In Nomine that really stands out in my mind is how the game harnesses the artificiality of the medium, in the form of both character classes and the distance between player and character, in the service of its theme.
Class/race combos are a part of our gaming heritage, of course, and more than that they're a shorthand for characters - a shorthand that says more about the character than you might expect. If your character is a dwarf fighter, I have a pretty good idea of how he's going to be played and what you wants out of the game - and if he's a dwarf wizard, then I know he'll be going against type for one or both, and furthermore, that you're willing to forego the advantages of traditional "optimized builds". In Nomine's equivalent to the class/race combo is choir/superior: A celestial character belongs to one of seven choirs of angels (or seven bands of demons), and serves a superior (An Archangel or Demon Prince bound to a Word). Each of these choirs and superiors has certain stereotypes, and certain choir/superior combos come up regularly: A Malakite (warrior-angel) of the Sword, for example, isn't going to need much explaining; ditto a Mercurian (friendly social angel) of Flowers. But switch those two around and we've got the dwarf wizard playing-against-type thing all over again.
The problem with such class/race systems, and the reason why most good games with human or humanesque protagonists dismiss it, is that they are artificially restrictive, and for characters who are meant to grow and develop organically, that's a big no-no. But IN's celestials aren't organic - much of the game's thematic tension comes from their being entities purpose-built by God, tools of the Divine Will, which are nevertheless possessed of a will of their own. The clunky artificiality of the choir/superior combos and their respective stereotypes actually reinforces this. A human wizard in D&D will never quite behave like a real human would and just pick up a damn sword once in a while. An IN angel likewise won't behave like a real human, won't lie to spare someone's feelings, or express a very reasonable fear, or moon over some girl in a bar - but he's not supposed to.
An old gag about RPG characters (and media characters more generally) is that they never eat or crap unless its vital to the plot. IN celestials are the same - thus, the lacunas in normal behaviour are built into the gameworld. In a sense, the oddities of being a "typical" Player Character - fanatical devotion to completing a set mission by any means necessary, a total disregard for the niceties of conversation, an immunity to the aesthetic charms of the world, and a tendency to do horrible things to bystanders on a whim - are well-modeled by celestials. And for those gamers who are more involved in the fictional world, there are humans, or celestials playing against their roles - even to the point of falling from grace, or redeeming. But the default of celestial behaviour is perfectly in line with the default of RPG player behaviour.
It's interesting to note that most games presume that the PCs are natives of their fantasy world - Whether that world is Grayhawk or Tekumel or the Sixth World. Another tack is to have the players be familiar human beings discovering a new world, either in the John Carter of Mars/various Cheapo Fantasy Novels sense of literally going to another world or in discovering that the world as they know it is not what it seems - the latter being the core of conspiracy and horror games since Call of Cthulhu. In Nomine thrusts the players into their familiar human world as total outsiders (or Outsiders), and uses the dissonance between what humans would want in their situation and what the players actually do to illustrate how strange these strangers are.
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Monday, September 12, 2011
Why I Like Cosmic Encounter
Illuminati minus all the bullshit
I enjoy Illuminati. The mechanics are solid, if a bit simplistic, the player interaction is swell, and it's definitely in the running for best theme ever (YMMV, depending on your love of conspiracy theory and controversial knowledge). But I rarely play it, for the simple reason that it takes a fucking eon. Part of this is bookkeeping: collecting money, spending money, shuffling it around, making change; part of it is table talk - the whining and cajoling and promises of support to one side or the other; and the lion's share is how anyone within spitting distance of a win condition gets dogpiled by all the other players, exhausting their resources and letting the second place runner walk to the win, or possibly third place if fate is exceptionally fickle. Overall, a soup-to-nuts game of Illuminati can take four or five hours, and that's assuming that everyone involved knows what they're doing.
Cosmic Encounter features all the things I like about Illuminati - politicking, sudden reversals, a simple system leading to complex results and a metric assload of possibilities - filed down to the razor point. Originally released in 1977, the game has gone through five different publishers and has a thriving community of grognards* to attest to how time and revision have done nothing to dampen its elegance. A game of Cosmic takes about an hour and contains the same amount of plotting, backstabbing and "No, fuck you"s as an Illuminati game four times as long.
The basics of Cosmic are clever enough, the kind of game you hope you could come up with if stuck in a mountain cabin with a deck of cards, a bunch of counters, and a group of friends who don't care for poker. Each player has five planets and 20 ships (the ships are cute little 50s saucers that stack equally cutely). Each turn, the offensive player draws a card from the Destiny deck to determine which player he will encounter, and sends one to four ships to meet'n'greet on one of the defensive player's planets. They then both ask for assistance from the other players - Anyone who's invited to can tag along on the invasion or try to defend the planet, depending who called on them. The offense and defense then each pick a card from their hand, play them facedown, and then reveal them.
The hand mechanic encourages strategy- each player gets eight cards, but they have to use all their encounter cards before they can get a new hand, so more isn't necessarily better. There are two types of encounter cards, attacks and negotiates. An attack has a value which is added to the number of ships on that player's side, and the higher total wins, destroying all of the other side's committed ships. A negotiate (essentially, "I come in peace") loses to any attack, but the losing player gets to take cards from the winner's hand equal to the number of ships they lost as compensation; so if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well get something for it. If both players play negotiates, they have one minute to make a deal or both lose three ships. There are many devious ploys to be had with this simple setup, such as trying to convince your opponent you want to negotiate and then shanking him with a low attack card, blasting a foe you know is going to play a negotiate with a high attack card to prevent them from getting it as compensation (or conversely using a negotiate to make an opponent waste a good attack), and a personal favourite, convincing one or more opponents to ally with you and then dropping a negotiate - You all lose your committed ships, but only you get anything for them. Not the kind of trick that works twice in one game, or earns you a lot of friends. But as Pope Boniface said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Winning as the offense gets you a colony on the attacked planet - both for the main player and all of his allies. Gain five colonies outside your home system and you win the game, easy as that. Winning as a defensive ally gains you extra cards, or gets back ships you lost before (the defensive main player himself gets no reward aside from keeping his planet) . Of course, either way you risk losing your ships and getting bupkis for them, so players won't want to get involved with every encounter.
That's the steak (and not a bad steak, either) but the sizzle is that every player gets a power that breaks these basic rules in some fundamental way. The Oracle can make their opponent reveal an encounter card before choosing their own, the Loser can make whoever loses win and vice-versa (but has to decide to do so before playing cards), and the Zombie doesn't die (a power that seems ludicrously broken until you note that it means he can't receive compensation for negotiating, the only sure way to get new cards if people won't let you ally). If a player loses three home colonies, they lose their power, making a full-offense strategy dangerous. Adding to these powers are a class of cards called Flares, each keyed to a particular alien, which either give another player a "wild" knockoff version of that alien's power or, if held by the player of that alien, supercharge it, and which can be reused. The core of the gameplay is in these powers (regular, wild and super), their use and interaction, and how this affects player interactions, threat perception and plotting.
As mentioned, despite the dizzying number of interactions (with the 90 aliens released thus far, there are over 5 trillion possible 7-player games), the base game is incredibly fast and simple to play; the straightforward scoring of offworld colonies (and the low number needed to win) makes it easy to grasp who's in the lead, but the Destiny deck's randomization of encounters makes it difficult to directly attack the leader, encouraging negotiations (or the negotiation-related shenanigans I mentioned earlier) between other players. The allies getting colonies and the potential of one-minute negotiations means that multiplayer wins are more than possible, they're likely**. The end result is a game that, while fast, has remarkable depth. Since I bought it, I've played it almost every day, I've won exactly half a game, and I'm still utterly obsessed with it.
* The Cosmic fan community, like game fans generally, is a mixed blessing. While hugely prolific and methodical (CE fansite The Warp has some 1700 alien powers in its catalogue, the bulk of them homebrews), it also teems with the nostalgic elitism and senseless causes one inevitably gets among gatherings of elder beardos. The most notable of these latter are the campaign to reintroduce the "Lucre" money mechanic (an entirely unnecessary addition to the game's economy of ships, cards and colonies, IMHO), the eagerness to bring back certain powers which they admit aren't very fun simply because they were in the first edition, and the seething hatred of a particular alien for being a Calvin and Hobbes reference.
** I can't help thinking that Cosmic would make an excellent game to play for money, if only to provide something more than gamer pride to discourage these kinds of group victories. Then again, handicapping the various alien and their powers would be a herculean task. Better make it nickel-ante.
I enjoy Illuminati. The mechanics are solid, if a bit simplistic, the player interaction is swell, and it's definitely in the running for best theme ever (YMMV, depending on your love of conspiracy theory and controversial knowledge). But I rarely play it, for the simple reason that it takes a fucking eon. Part of this is bookkeeping: collecting money, spending money, shuffling it around, making change; part of it is table talk - the whining and cajoling and promises of support to one side or the other; and the lion's share is how anyone within spitting distance of a win condition gets dogpiled by all the other players, exhausting their resources and letting the second place runner walk to the win, or possibly third place if fate is exceptionally fickle. Overall, a soup-to-nuts game of Illuminati can take four or five hours, and that's assuming that everyone involved knows what they're doing.
 |
| Also, the game's art is a) fantastic and b) features jokes like this. |
The basics of Cosmic are clever enough, the kind of game you hope you could come up with if stuck in a mountain cabin with a deck of cards, a bunch of counters, and a group of friends who don't care for poker. Each player has five planets and 20 ships (the ships are cute little 50s saucers that stack equally cutely). Each turn, the offensive player draws a card from the Destiny deck to determine which player he will encounter, and sends one to four ships to meet'n'greet on one of the defensive player's planets. They then both ask for assistance from the other players - Anyone who's invited to can tag along on the invasion or try to defend the planet, depending who called on them. The offense and defense then each pick a card from their hand, play them facedown, and then reveal them.
The hand mechanic encourages strategy- each player gets eight cards, but they have to use all their encounter cards before they can get a new hand, so more isn't necessarily better. There are two types of encounter cards, attacks and negotiates. An attack has a value which is added to the number of ships on that player's side, and the higher total wins, destroying all of the other side's committed ships. A negotiate (essentially, "I come in peace") loses to any attack, but the losing player gets to take cards from the winner's hand equal to the number of ships they lost as compensation; so if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well get something for it. If both players play negotiates, they have one minute to make a deal or both lose three ships. There are many devious ploys to be had with this simple setup, such as trying to convince your opponent you want to negotiate and then shanking him with a low attack card, blasting a foe you know is going to play a negotiate with a high attack card to prevent them from getting it as compensation (or conversely using a negotiate to make an opponent waste a good attack), and a personal favourite, convincing one or more opponents to ally with you and then dropping a negotiate - You all lose your committed ships, but only you get anything for them. Not the kind of trick that works twice in one game, or earns you a lot of friends. But as Pope Boniface said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Winning as the offense gets you a colony on the attacked planet - both for the main player and all of his allies. Gain five colonies outside your home system and you win the game, easy as that. Winning as a defensive ally gains you extra cards, or gets back ships you lost before (the defensive main player himself gets no reward aside from keeping his planet) . Of course, either way you risk losing your ships and getting bupkis for them, so players won't want to get involved with every encounter.
 | |||||
| And this. |
As mentioned, despite the dizzying number of interactions (with the 90 aliens released thus far, there are over 5 trillion possible 7-player games), the base game is incredibly fast and simple to play; the straightforward scoring of offworld colonies (and the low number needed to win) makes it easy to grasp who's in the lead, but the Destiny deck's randomization of encounters makes it difficult to directly attack the leader, encouraging negotiations (or the negotiation-related shenanigans I mentioned earlier) between other players. The allies getting colonies and the potential of one-minute negotiations means that multiplayer wins are more than possible, they're likely**. The end result is a game that, while fast, has remarkable depth. Since I bought it, I've played it almost every day, I've won exactly half a game, and I'm still utterly obsessed with it.
* The Cosmic fan community, like game fans generally, is a mixed blessing. While hugely prolific and methodical (CE fansite The Warp has some 1700 alien powers in its catalogue, the bulk of them homebrews), it also teems with the nostalgic elitism and senseless causes one inevitably gets among gatherings of elder beardos. The most notable of these latter are the campaign to reintroduce the "Lucre" money mechanic (an entirely unnecessary addition to the game's economy of ships, cards and colonies, IMHO), the eagerness to bring back certain powers which they admit aren't very fun simply because they were in the first edition, and the seething hatred of a particular alien for being a Calvin and Hobbes reference.
** I can't help thinking that Cosmic would make an excellent game to play for money, if only to provide something more than gamer pride to discourage these kinds of group victories. Then again, handicapping the various alien and their powers would be a herculean task. Better make it nickel-ante.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Cthulhu 2210
I won a copy of Cthulhu Dice at a con, and it's become an obsession to try and find an actual use for this goofy die covered in Cthulhoid iconography, given that CD, as a game, ain't that hot. So I figured hey, what game appreciates a good bit of randomness and occasional hilarious unfairness better than 2210? So here's a new threat to add to your amoebas and zombies and alien conquerors, the mythos cults, with the twist that it's quite possible (and occasionally beneficial) to coexist with them. Right up until ol' tentacle-face eats you.
Setup: Draw a number of land territories equal to the number of players, or a minimum of 3, after all players have claimed their territories but before the 3-unit fortification begins. Place a cult marker on each territory thus drawn. Cult markers coexist with any units in a territory, and have no effect on that army until the end of the year. No territory can ever have more than one cult marker.
Roll: At the end of each year, roll the Cthulhu die.
Yellow Sign: Spread. Cults attempt to spread to adjacent territories.
Tentacle: Seduce. Cults attempt to seduce units both in their own territories and in adjacent occupied territories.
Elder Sign: Dark Power. All players gain energy equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Eye of Horus: Dark Reinforcement. All players gain MODs equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Cthulhu: Rising. Destroy 1 unit in every territory with a cult marker. Roll again.
Spreading: When a Yellow Sign is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. If any of these territories are adjacent to a territory that already has a cult marker, but does not have one of its own, the cult attempts to spread. Roll 1d3: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, the cult spreads. Place a cult marker on that territory. Unlike invasions, the player who controls the territory may choose to voluntarily fail this roll, inviting the cult in. If a territory drawn has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, or already has a cult marker, it has no effect.
Assisting the cults: On their own, the cults may not spread to water or space territories. Players may opt to assist the cults, either to infiltrate rivals, because they hope to take advantage of the cults' very occasional generosity, or because they just want to make it somebody else's problem. A player with a naval commander and a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory card the cult would otherwise draw with a water territory. A player with a space commander in play and a space station in a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory the cults would otherwise draw with a space territory. Only one such substitution (either water or space) may be made per player. The cults, being reckless and in league with dark powers of both ocean and space, do not need to limit themselves to the prescribed landing zones and coastlines that limit traditional armies, and cards drawn from such assistance do not need adjacent territories to support the attack (in later turns, such assistance cards should be separated from water and space territories drawn normally). However, water and space are difficult for cultists to survive in, and their rolls to spread to such territories are made at -1 (thus a 1 always fails). If successful, the cult establishes itself in the new territory, and on future spreading and seduction results, draws a card from the appropriate deck. The cults may spread into water territories adjacent to coastal land territories with a cult marker, or any of the normal space landing areas if there is any land territory with both a cult marker and a space station.
Seduction: Seduction works similarly to spreading: When a tentacle is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. However, there are several differences. If a territory drawn during seduction is entirely unoccupied, or only has a cult marker, or has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, it has no effect. If a territory drawn is occupied, has no cult marker of its own, but is adjacent to a territory that has a cult marker, the cult attempts to seduce the army there: Roll 1d3, and if the result is higher than the number of units on the territory, destroy one unit and place a cult marker (this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker). Again, the player who owns the territory may voluntarily fail the roll to invite the cult in, but they still lose one unit. If a territory drawn is occupied and already has a cult marker, roll 1d3+1: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, destroy one (again, this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker.
As with spreading, players may choose to assist the cults' seduction by replacing land territory cards drawn with water or space territories, with the same restrictions and the same exception to the need for an adjacent territory (an empty territory, or one with a cult marker alone, still has no effect). However, seduction does not have the same -1 penalty to expand to such territories as spreading, since they are co-opting the existent survival structures (and the cults roll 1d3+1 as above if the territory drawn already has a cult marker).
Dark Power: Rolling an Elder Sign provides a pure energy benny for those willing to put up with an occasional ritual sacrifice and the possibility of monstrous rising. All players gain energy equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up.
Dark Reinforcement: Likewise straightforward, rolling the Eye of Horus means the cults lend their military power to those good enough to turn a blind eye to their doings. All players gain MODs equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up. These MODs may only be placed on territories with cult markers, but may otherwise be placed freely
Rising: But it's not all gravy trains and bloody sacrifice. One unit is destroyed in every territory with a cult marker, and the die is rolled again. And yes, it is possible to roll Rising repeatedly.
Fighting the cults: Considering the nastiness of seduction and the always-present possibility of the big guy's rising, players may be justified in wanting to exterminate the cults. This is done during a player's turn as an invasion, including any bonuses for commanders, territory type or Command cards. Cults defend using a single d8, and win ties as normal. Cults cannot be purged from a territory with only one unit. A territory's surviving units may still invade as normal after purging a cult, and an attacker may purge a cult in an invaded territory as a continuation of the original attack (the defending player cannot use the cult to defend, and the attacker is not obligated to destroy the cult before occupying the territory).
The only way to be sure?: Nuclear cards only destroy a cult if they have already destroyed all other units in the territory and there is still at least one unit worth of overkill. Thus, the continental weapon cards cannot kill a cult unless the territory was already otherwise unoccupied; ditto scatter bombs. Other Command cards have no effect - Cults cannot be removed by MOD Reduction and are immune to Death Traps.
Potential variants being considered:
Weaker cults: Change the cults' defense roll to a d6. Makes them less of a hassle to wipe out, and thus less of a strategic concern.
Monstrous rising: When a Rising is rolled, 1d3 units are destroyed in each territory with a cult marker. Multiple risings are catastrophic, and cleansing cults becomes a major concern.
That is not dead: At the end of a year in which all cults have been destroyed or when there are fewer than three cult markers in play, draw three land territory cards and place a cult marker in each, then roll as normal.
Multiple rolls: At the end of the year, roll once for every (5/7/# of players in the game) cult markers in play, resolving each roll completely before the next is made. Risings (or multiple Risings!) and the following roll count as one roll.
Wiped themselves out: If a Rising is rolled and there are no other units in a territory with a cult marker, remove the cult marker.
These were the most loyal: In conjunction with the above, every time a cult marker is destroyed by a Rising, place it aside (on a doom track, if you will). It now counts as permanently in play for purposes of the number of rolls made if using Multiple rolls, above, or raises the minimum number of cult markers that must actually be in play for That is not dead, above, or adds an additional territory card to those drawn for That is not dead, or adds to any rolls made by the cults still in play, or if you're exceptionally masochistic, all of the above. For slightly less masochism, restrict this to one marker per Rising rolled, or one per year.
The End is Here: If at any time a cult marker would be placed and there are no more cult markers available, Cthulhu rises and nobody wins. The viciousness of this is dependent on how many markers are available (I have 21).
Oh, and for those of you who don't have the overpriced novelty die this is based on, you can replicate it with a regular d12:
1-5: Spread
6-9: Seduce
10: Dark Power
11: Dark Reinforcement
12: Rising
Setup: Draw a number of land territories equal to the number of players, or a minimum of 3, after all players have claimed their territories but before the 3-unit fortification begins. Place a cult marker on each territory thus drawn. Cult markers coexist with any units in a territory, and have no effect on that army until the end of the year. No territory can ever have more than one cult marker.
Roll: At the end of each year, roll the Cthulhu die.
Yellow Sign: Spread. Cults attempt to spread to adjacent territories.
Tentacle: Seduce. Cults attempt to seduce units both in their own territories and in adjacent occupied territories.
Elder Sign: Dark Power. All players gain energy equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Eye of Horus: Dark Reinforcement. All players gain MODs equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Cthulhu: Rising. Destroy 1 unit in every territory with a cult marker. Roll again.
Spreading: When a Yellow Sign is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. If any of these territories are adjacent to a territory that already has a cult marker, but does not have one of its own, the cult attempts to spread. Roll 1d3: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, the cult spreads. Place a cult marker on that territory. Unlike invasions, the player who controls the territory may choose to voluntarily fail this roll, inviting the cult in. If a territory drawn has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, or already has a cult marker, it has no effect.
Assisting the cults: On their own, the cults may not spread to water or space territories. Players may opt to assist the cults, either to infiltrate rivals, because they hope to take advantage of the cults' very occasional generosity, or because they just want to make it somebody else's problem. A player with a naval commander and a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory card the cult would otherwise draw with a water territory. A player with a space commander in play and a space station in a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory the cults would otherwise draw with a space territory. Only one such substitution (either water or space) may be made per player. The cults, being reckless and in league with dark powers of both ocean and space, do not need to limit themselves to the prescribed landing zones and coastlines that limit traditional armies, and cards drawn from such assistance do not need adjacent territories to support the attack (in later turns, such assistance cards should be separated from water and space territories drawn normally). However, water and space are difficult for cultists to survive in, and their rolls to spread to such territories are made at -1 (thus a 1 always fails). If successful, the cult establishes itself in the new territory, and on future spreading and seduction results, draws a card from the appropriate deck. The cults may spread into water territories adjacent to coastal land territories with a cult marker, or any of the normal space landing areas if there is any land territory with both a cult marker and a space station.
Seduction: Seduction works similarly to spreading: When a tentacle is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. However, there are several differences. If a territory drawn during seduction is entirely unoccupied, or only has a cult marker, or has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, it has no effect. If a territory drawn is occupied, has no cult marker of its own, but is adjacent to a territory that has a cult marker, the cult attempts to seduce the army there: Roll 1d3, and if the result is higher than the number of units on the territory, destroy one unit and place a cult marker (this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker). Again, the player who owns the territory may voluntarily fail the roll to invite the cult in, but they still lose one unit. If a territory drawn is occupied and already has a cult marker, roll 1d3+1: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, destroy one (again, this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker.
As with spreading, players may choose to assist the cults' seduction by replacing land territory cards drawn with water or space territories, with the same restrictions and the same exception to the need for an adjacent territory (an empty territory, or one with a cult marker alone, still has no effect). However, seduction does not have the same -1 penalty to expand to such territories as spreading, since they are co-opting the existent survival structures (and the cults roll 1d3+1 as above if the territory drawn already has a cult marker).
Dark Power: Rolling an Elder Sign provides a pure energy benny for those willing to put up with an occasional ritual sacrifice and the possibility of monstrous rising. All players gain energy equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up.
Dark Reinforcement: Likewise straightforward, rolling the Eye of Horus means the cults lend their military power to those good enough to turn a blind eye to their doings. All players gain MODs equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up. These MODs may only be placed on territories with cult markers, but may otherwise be placed freely
Rising: But it's not all gravy trains and bloody sacrifice. One unit is destroyed in every territory with a cult marker, and the die is rolled again. And yes, it is possible to roll Rising repeatedly.
Fighting the cults: Considering the nastiness of seduction and the always-present possibility of the big guy's rising, players may be justified in wanting to exterminate the cults. This is done during a player's turn as an invasion, including any bonuses for commanders, territory type or Command cards. Cults defend using a single d8, and win ties as normal. Cults cannot be purged from a territory with only one unit. A territory's surviving units may still invade as normal after purging a cult, and an attacker may purge a cult in an invaded territory as a continuation of the original attack (the defending player cannot use the cult to defend, and the attacker is not obligated to destroy the cult before occupying the territory).
The only way to be sure?: Nuclear cards only destroy a cult if they have already destroyed all other units in the territory and there is still at least one unit worth of overkill. Thus, the continental weapon cards cannot kill a cult unless the territory was already otherwise unoccupied; ditto scatter bombs. Other Command cards have no effect - Cults cannot be removed by MOD Reduction and are immune to Death Traps.
Potential variants being considered:
Weaker cults: Change the cults' defense roll to a d6. Makes them less of a hassle to wipe out, and thus less of a strategic concern.
Monstrous rising: When a Rising is rolled, 1d3 units are destroyed in each territory with a cult marker. Multiple risings are catastrophic, and cleansing cults becomes a major concern.
That is not dead: At the end of a year in which all cults have been destroyed or when there are fewer than three cult markers in play, draw three land territory cards and place a cult marker in each, then roll as normal.
Multiple rolls: At the end of the year, roll once for every (5/7/# of players in the game) cult markers in play, resolving each roll completely before the next is made. Risings (or multiple Risings!) and the following roll count as one roll.
Wiped themselves out: If a Rising is rolled and there are no other units in a territory with a cult marker, remove the cult marker.
These were the most loyal: In conjunction with the above, every time a cult marker is destroyed by a Rising, place it aside (on a doom track, if you will). It now counts as permanently in play for purposes of the number of rolls made if using Multiple rolls, above, or raises the minimum number of cult markers that must actually be in play for That is not dead, above, or adds an additional territory card to those drawn for That is not dead, or adds to any rolls made by the cults still in play, or if you're exceptionally masochistic, all of the above. For slightly less masochism, restrict this to one marker per Rising rolled, or one per year.
The End is Here: If at any time a cult marker would be placed and there are no more cult markers available, Cthulhu rises and nobody wins. The viciousness of this is dependent on how many markers are available (I have 21).
Oh, and for those of you who don't have the overpriced novelty die this is based on, you can replicate it with a regular d12:
1-5: Spread
6-9: Seduce
10: Dark Power
11: Dark Reinforcement
12: Rising
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
NGE CCG: OMG WTF ASL
Giant Monsters and Emotional Abuse, Now in Card Game Form!
There was a full-on, playable collectible card game based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll let those of you familiar with that series pick up the shattered remnants of your exploded heads, before we catch up the unenlightened.
NGE is an anime show that often gets fulsome praise these days for inverting the expectations of the viewing audience. It started as a fairly straightforward teenage-boy-pilots-giant-robot show with a lot of (literally) arbitrary Judeo-Christian-Freudian mythology as set dressing, and then took a headlong dive into psychological fuckery, high weirdness, and ultimately the creator more or less directly telling anime fandom as a whole to put on a non-dragon shirt and leave the basement for God's sake. Of course, as certain observers have pointed out, this message was somewhat diluted by the creators' willingness to pimp out the series for a wide variety of collectibles. tie-ins and relaunches, many of which involved heavily sexualized incarnations of the two pubescent female pilots, colour-coded for your convenience as red (dominant) and blue/white (submissive). The demands of crass commercialism and creepy anime fandom aside, NGE managed to squeeze out a pretty decent boy-becomes-man story viewed through the funhouse mirror of animoo.
The NGE CCG, one of the tie-ins relatively light on both crass and creep, is actually startlingly faithful to its source material. Relationships between characters are key to gameplay, and six of the main characters from the series are arranged in a pentagon plus the three Evas (aforementioned giant robots) below, creating something like a Tarot layout1. Every card title is a line from the show, spoken by a character in the relationship matrix - Ordinarily, each character can only speak one line per turn, though as in all CCGs, rules are flexible things. Cards can be played both for their normal effect, or flipped over for another line that can be used to either attract or harm a character. In the former case, the targeted character is "grouped" with the character who spoke the card - in the latter, they're either broken out of whatever group they're in, or if alone, are "downed" (injured, sunk into a deep pit of despair) until someone says something nice to them and gives them the strength to carry on and keep fighting (this is anime, after all)2. Characters who are downed can't speak cards, and pilots who are downed can't pilot Evas and fight Angels (the giant monsters drenched in aforementioned Judeo-Christian mythology).
Another interesting rule is the "Draw points" in the upper right corner. Rather than drawing one card per turn automatically as in Magic, you draw a number of cards at the end of the turn equal to the total draw points of the cards you played. Most cards are worth +1, including all cards played as attract/harm lines3. Particularly powerful cards are worth 0, and devastating ones are worth negative draw points, requiring a player to discard cards. Since having no cards in hand at the end of a turn eliminates a player, this serves as a rather severe limiting factor4. It's an oddly roundabout way of doing things, and keeping track of total draw points looks like a pain in the ass, but the suspense of instant elimination unless cards are shepherded very carefully could save the system.
The CCG is also faithful to its roots in that the victory conditions vary - Each player chooses a particular consummation card to start, and although consummations are tied to particular characters, a given character has several consummations (reflecting various goals they had over the course of the series). Victory is achieved by first reaching a particular gamestate (two characters are grouped together, a certain character is downed, you defeat an Angel) and then flipping the victory card over and achieving a different condition. The sheer variety of win conditions means that, particularly for the first "level" of victory, it's not a zero-sum game - One action can easily fulfill multiple win conditions. Although Angels have to be defeated (an undefeated Angel forces the active player to discard cards, hastening their end as mentioned), their defeat is often only incidental to the ultimate goal of the game, which again works well for a show where the giant monsters often took a backseat to the main character's torturous and mindfucky relationship with his father, his fellow pilots, and pretty much everyone he met.
Is it any good as a game? No idea - despite an entire cardset and rulebook being translated and made available online, I haven't yet gone mad enough to try printing the whole damn thing out and negotiating the fan-translation on the cards (See the card above - it's powerfully evocative of the feel of the show, but what the hell does it mean? Does Shinji's group break up? Are cards attached to him discarded? The rulebook offers no assistance). It remains a mysterious enigma of odd rules and Mysterious Japanese Game Design, waiting for the day I lose my sense entirely and attempt to print and play. For the time being, I'm quite content just to know that it exists.
There was a full-on, playable collectible card game based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll let those of you familiar with that series pick up the shattered remnants of your exploded heads, before we catch up the unenlightened.
NGE is an anime show that often gets fulsome praise these days for inverting the expectations of the viewing audience. It started as a fairly straightforward teenage-boy-pilots-giant-robot show with a lot of (literally) arbitrary Judeo-Christian-Freudian mythology as set dressing, and then took a headlong dive into psychological fuckery, high weirdness, and ultimately the creator more or less directly telling anime fandom as a whole to put on a non-dragon shirt and leave the basement for God's sake. Of course, as certain observers have pointed out, this message was somewhat diluted by the creators' willingness to pimp out the series for a wide variety of collectibles. tie-ins and relaunches, many of which involved heavily sexualized incarnations of the two pubescent female pilots, colour-coded for your convenience as red (dominant) and blue/white (submissive). The demands of crass commercialism and creepy anime fandom aside, NGE managed to squeeze out a pretty decent boy-becomes-man story viewed through the funhouse mirror of animoo.
Another interesting rule is the "Draw points" in the upper right corner. Rather than drawing one card per turn automatically as in Magic, you draw a number of cards at the end of the turn equal to the total draw points of the cards you played. Most cards are worth +1, including all cards played as attract/harm lines3. Particularly powerful cards are worth 0, and devastating ones are worth negative draw points, requiring a player to discard cards. Since having no cards in hand at the end of a turn eliminates a player, this serves as a rather severe limiting factor4. It's an oddly roundabout way of doing things, and keeping track of total draw points looks like a pain in the ass, but the suspense of instant elimination unless cards are shepherded very carefully could save the system.
The CCG is also faithful to its roots in that the victory conditions vary - Each player chooses a particular consummation card to start, and although consummations are tied to particular characters, a given character has several consummations (reflecting various goals they had over the course of the series). Victory is achieved by first reaching a particular gamestate (two characters are grouped together, a certain character is downed, you defeat an Angel) and then flipping the victory card over and achieving a different condition. The sheer variety of win conditions means that, particularly for the first "level" of victory, it's not a zero-sum game - One action can easily fulfill multiple win conditions. Although Angels have to be defeated (an undefeated Angel forces the active player to discard cards, hastening their end as mentioned), their defeat is often only incidental to the ultimate goal of the game, which again works well for a show where the giant monsters often took a backseat to the main character's torturous and mindfucky relationship with his father, his fellow pilots, and pretty much everyone he met.
Is it any good as a game? No idea - despite an entire cardset and rulebook being translated and made available online, I haven't yet gone mad enough to try printing the whole damn thing out and negotiating the fan-translation on the cards (See the card above - it's powerfully evocative of the feel of the show, but what the hell does it mean? Does Shinji's group break up? Are cards attached to him discarded? The rulebook offers no assistance). It remains a mysterious enigma of odd rules and Mysterious Japanese Game Design, waiting for the day I lose my sense entirely and attempt to print and play. For the time being, I'm quite content just to know that it exists.
- And heap another layer of symbolism on there, whynot.
- Rei Ayanami is the only character who automatically recovers from being downed every turn. It's a big old spoiler to explain why this rule exists, but it amused me to no end.
- Again, except for Rei, whose attract/harm lines are worth 0. And again, hee hee hee.
- Although logical, since a player with no cards has no means of getting new ones.
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Thursday, April 7, 2011
Agents of FATE: Groundwork
So I've been watching Archer1, and it has once again given me that itch to run a spy game that I tend to get after any series focusing on international cloak-n-daggerery (Cf. The Sandbaggers, Burn Notice, Queen and Country, The Prisoner), but which inevitably seems to fade once the inherent challenges of crafting a properly back-stabby scenario rear their ugly head. A ways back I picked up thirteen books worth of first-edition Spycraft, which is a pretty decent implementation of d20's better bastards (complete with ACTION POINTS!!!! and a vitality/wound system cribbed from d20 Modern and Star Wars respectively) but which nevertheless suffers from d20's general problem with specialization and situational advantages. It can be best summarized with a single feat: Rocket Launcher Mastery. Aside from niggling simulationist questions about how you get enough field experience with a highly situational weapon to be considered to have mastered it, and the pain in the ass of remembering every little bonus the feat gives you when you use it, there's the point of how to please the player who has taken this feat (and the other feats before it in the tree) and made it a part of his character. Working situations that can only be solved by rocketry into the plot is simple enough, even if bringing in a helicopter or a tank every week smacks of FPS or Metal Gear - The real trouble is when, having focused on this element of the character, the player attempts to solve all problems with high-speed explosives, turning every climactic encounter into the one from Invasion USA. Add to this the remarkably 'spergy system for creating villainous organizations, and it's clear that Spycraft's a little too close to its parent for comfort. I would, however, love to use it as inspiration - the Shadowforce Archer2 setting is pretty nifty, though I may just be saying that because it appeals to my love of Magic Nazis and goofy gadget stuff like fake money that can be chewed up and turned into an adhesive.
So instead, let's take my much-beloved FATE system and toss some tweaks in there to make it sing. A lot of what follows assumes a familiarity with 2nd and 3rd-edition FATE, available for free from Evil Hat Games, but should be simple enough to follow along - Call it FATE 2.5, or FATE Un-Stunted. Other sources include John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors, Greg Stolze's A Dirty World and my eternally recurring inspiration, Ron Edwards' Sorcerer.
So, let's start with Aspects. These would be pretty much as in FATE 3, as the limit on uses-per-session from FATE 2 always seemed weirdly arbitrary and reminded me of the most annoying part of GUMSHOE. Fuelling Aspect invocations with Fate points makes considerably more sense. The full ten aspects seems a bit much, though - Maybe a mere seven, to have characters that are broadly capable but not as omnicapable as the standard Spirit of the Century characters. Of these, two would be required, or at least given a skill point benny: One a belief or motivation that a character considers vitally important, be it commitment to country, agency, democracy, no killing women, etc. - And the other, something for which the character would be willing to betray that belief. Hey, trust's a bitch in spy fiction.
As far as skills go, I'd want characters to be highly skilled, meaning a relatively small and expansive skill list. I'd probably port the FATE 2 skill system directly, including the pyramid, although tying the skills directly to the aspects might be overdoing it. As in FATE 2, if you're willing to take a hit on skills, you can buy plot-important objects with skill points, allowing you to have the fancy car or the favoured gun or what have you. You can also spend Fate points for these in-game, of course, but then they're set dressing - Improbably explosive set dressing, in many cases.
No stunts. I don't care for them. The idea of a cool move that you can do all the time, at will, just seems dumb and ironically uncool. You want a neat trick, invoke an aspect and justify it and we're off to the races.
As for actual resolution, this is where the Sorcerer bit comes in, kinda. Under normal circumstances, without description, characters only roll 3 dice instead of the FATE-standard 4, making for a slightly smaller range of possible results. But, if they describe the action well, they get an extra die. If the description is really good, they get two. If it's absolutely amazing, they get three, but that should only happen once per session, if that. Now, clever readers familiar with FATE will note that, unlike Sorcerer or Exalted or Wushu or other systems that give bonus dice for description, this doesn't make you more likely to succeed - It just makes the range of possible outcomes wider. This is intentional. Playing Wushu, I was frustrated by loquacious players filibustering absolutely every move they made regardless of actual narrative importance, just to get the dice. Describing a scene under this system doesn't make you better at it, it makes the scene more important and more pivotal, for good or bad. Since players are going to have a lot of Fate points, they can probably turn a failure into a success (with, yes, even more description), and a regular success into an overwhelming, suitably awesome victory (a +5 result is pretty badass, and +6 is worthy of Bond at his best) - but mere description isn't going to guarantee it, and a really well-described action could result a failure so massive that even Fate points couldn't fix it. If that did happen (say a player tosses a -4 or worse on a five-dice roll), I'd definitely consider giving the poor schlub a a Fate point or two just so his grand description didn't go to waste. And then, of course, I'd work out the worst possible way for such a big, important action to go wrong. The GM is also well within his rights to simply declare an action climactic even if the player is trying to play it safe by not describing it, so the player might as well go all out and get the benny if he fails.
Okay, now for the other two gaming sources. From Wilderness of Mirrors, there's the notions of planning, timing and betrayal. In WoM, the GM just details the basic goal of the mission and players fill in details like security arrangements, opposition, locations etc, getting points from the GM for every detail they provide and extra ones for particularly diabolical scene-setups. This seems directly portable to FATE - The opening loadout of Fate points is dependent on the scenario the players set up, and allows them to more or less describe the mission they want. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, etc. and so we move on to timing. For every, let's say, ten minutes of real time that pass, the GM gets a point to mess with the players, change some element of their planned arrangement, etc. I'm not sure yet if these would be additions to the NPC Fate point pool or separate - Certainly it seems most logical, since it keeps down the number of variables.
Finally, there's betrayal, and here's where WoM crosses over with A Dirty World. PCs in ADW can get points both for being cruel to each other and having cruelty done to them. A similar arrangement here would mean that a character who screws over another in-character (Remember that inspiration-for-betrayal Aspect? Yeah, that came back) gets Fate points both for himself and the player they're dumping in the soup - Probably two or more, just to make it extra appealing. Along those lines, perhaps I should add the option to leave an Aspect undefined, so that the player can just reveal his perfidy at the moment rather than having DOUBLE AGENT on his character sheet the whole game.
There's the start of it - If any of you six people who check my blog have suggestions as to how to make it even more convoluted, or of obvious flaws I should patch, feel free to weigh in. And if anyone's got a suggestion for a good spy-agency backronym from FATE, so much the better.
So instead, let's take my much-beloved FATE system and toss some tweaks in there to make it sing. A lot of what follows assumes a familiarity with 2nd and 3rd-edition FATE, available for free from Evil Hat Games, but should be simple enough to follow along - Call it FATE 2.5, or FATE Un-Stunted. Other sources include John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors, Greg Stolze's A Dirty World and my eternally recurring inspiration, Ron Edwards' Sorcerer.
So, let's start with Aspects. These would be pretty much as in FATE 3, as the limit on uses-per-session from FATE 2 always seemed weirdly arbitrary and reminded me of the most annoying part of GUMSHOE. Fuelling Aspect invocations with Fate points makes considerably more sense. The full ten aspects seems a bit much, though - Maybe a mere seven, to have characters that are broadly capable but not as omnicapable as the standard Spirit of the Century characters. Of these, two would be required, or at least given a skill point benny: One a belief or motivation that a character considers vitally important, be it commitment to country, agency, democracy, no killing women, etc. - And the other, something for which the character would be willing to betray that belief. Hey, trust's a bitch in spy fiction.
As far as skills go, I'd want characters to be highly skilled, meaning a relatively small and expansive skill list. I'd probably port the FATE 2 skill system directly, including the pyramid, although tying the skills directly to the aspects might be overdoing it. As in FATE 2, if you're willing to take a hit on skills, you can buy plot-important objects with skill points, allowing you to have the fancy car or the favoured gun or what have you. You can also spend Fate points for these in-game, of course, but then they're set dressing - Improbably explosive set dressing, in many cases.
No stunts. I don't care for them. The idea of a cool move that you can do all the time, at will, just seems dumb and ironically uncool. You want a neat trick, invoke an aspect and justify it and we're off to the races.
As for actual resolution, this is where the Sorcerer bit comes in, kinda. Under normal circumstances, without description, characters only roll 3 dice instead of the FATE-standard 4, making for a slightly smaller range of possible results. But, if they describe the action well, they get an extra die. If the description is really good, they get two. If it's absolutely amazing, they get three, but that should only happen once per session, if that. Now, clever readers familiar with FATE will note that, unlike Sorcerer or Exalted or Wushu or other systems that give bonus dice for description, this doesn't make you more likely to succeed - It just makes the range of possible outcomes wider. This is intentional. Playing Wushu, I was frustrated by loquacious players filibustering absolutely every move they made regardless of actual narrative importance, just to get the dice. Describing a scene under this system doesn't make you better at it, it makes the scene more important and more pivotal, for good or bad. Since players are going to have a lot of Fate points, they can probably turn a failure into a success (with, yes, even more description), and a regular success into an overwhelming, suitably awesome victory (a +5 result is pretty badass, and +6 is worthy of Bond at his best) - but mere description isn't going to guarantee it, and a really well-described action could result a failure so massive that even Fate points couldn't fix it. If that did happen (say a player tosses a -4 or worse on a five-dice roll), I'd definitely consider giving the poor schlub a a Fate point or two just so his grand description didn't go to waste. And then, of course, I'd work out the worst possible way for such a big, important action to go wrong. The GM is also well within his rights to simply declare an action climactic even if the player is trying to play it safe by not describing it, so the player might as well go all out and get the benny if he fails.
Okay, now for the other two gaming sources. From Wilderness of Mirrors, there's the notions of planning, timing and betrayal. In WoM, the GM just details the basic goal of the mission and players fill in details like security arrangements, opposition, locations etc, getting points from the GM for every detail they provide and extra ones for particularly diabolical scene-setups. This seems directly portable to FATE - The opening loadout of Fate points is dependent on the scenario the players set up, and allows them to more or less describe the mission they want. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, etc. and so we move on to timing. For every, let's say, ten minutes of real time that pass, the GM gets a point to mess with the players, change some element of their planned arrangement, etc. I'm not sure yet if these would be additions to the NPC Fate point pool or separate - Certainly it seems most logical, since it keeps down the number of variables.
Finally, there's betrayal, and here's where WoM crosses over with A Dirty World. PCs in ADW can get points both for being cruel to each other and having cruelty done to them. A similar arrangement here would mean that a character who screws over another in-character (Remember that inspiration-for-betrayal Aspect? Yeah, that came back) gets Fate points both for himself and the player they're dumping in the soup - Probably two or more, just to make it extra appealing. Along those lines, perhaps I should add the option to leave an Aspect undefined, so that the player can just reveal his perfidy at the moment rather than having DOUBLE AGENT on his character sheet the whole game.
There's the start of it - If any of you six people who check my blog have suggestions as to how to make it even more convoluted, or of obvious flaws I should patch, feel free to weigh in. And if anyone's got a suggestion for a good spy-agency backronym from FATE, so much the better.
- Seriously, I could sit and listen to H. Jon Benjamin yell all day.
- What is it with the name Archer and spy fiction? The eponymous jackass agent in the aforementioned Archer, this setting, Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever; is it a reference I don't get, or just a coincidence?
Monday, April 4, 2011
Why I Like Blue Moon
It seems I'm late for everything. My friends have learned not to trust anything I say about when I'll show up. My professors have been remarkably accommodating of my tendency to grin sheepishly and say "At least it's only three days late this time." Slip me some scotch and put on Human Traffic, and you'll get to hear me bitch at considerable length about how I got into the rave scene about seven years too late and four years too old.
So it goes with Blue Moon. By the time I found out about it, it had been out of print since 2007, leading to jacked up prices on what core sets were still available. On the up side, the supplemental decks are going for a song (six bucks a go on Meeplemart), and the game can be played with just these expansions and the rules, so The Hunger can be at least partially satisfied.
Blue Moon was created by Reiner Knizia, who I can't mentally name without adding an apostrophe like Flapjack's Captain K'nuckles. K'nizia is the Frank Zappa of game design, which is to say, ridiculously prolific - in an industry where every gamer wants to be a designer, he has over 500 published games - and massively influential - He's pretty much the face of the German school of game design, and his games reflect that school's obsession with simple rules and complex strategy.
Blue Moon's an excellent example of both. The game is played with 30-card decks representing various crazy fantasy races (mercifully none of the Tolkien assortment pack - I'll take bright red golem/natives and caterpillar people over orks'n'elves any day) trying to win fights and thus seduce the three fickle dragons that rule their world. To do this, you play a character card, declare whether the ensuing fight is to be fought based on the Fire or Earth stats and draw new cards. Your opponent plays another character (or combination of a character and a support or booster card - Boosters only affect a particular character, supports affect all the characters you play that fight) to equal or exceed your value in the chosen element. If they do, you have to play a new character and support cards to equal or exceed them. This back-and-forth continues until one player can't or won't equal the current active total, whereupon they admit defeat, the other side moves one or more dragons to their side (or from the loser's side to neutral), all the cards in play are discarded, and the loser starts a new fight. This continues until one player has all three dragons and would win another, or until one player runs out of cards, in which case the player with any dragons (or, failing that, any cards) wins.
There's some interesting conflict and tough choices to be had just using this simple arrangement. If you have a character with a mediocre Earth and strong Fire, do you play it to continue the current Earth-based fight, or retreat and save it for later? Do you keep the level of the fight relatively low, allowing both you and your opponent to toss out small fry characters and wear each other down, or do you escalate and hope to overcome on sheer shock and awe (particularly worrisome if you don't have the resources to keep the escalated fight going another round)? Another point to add to this hand-wringing: If the winner has played six or more cards, they attract an extra dragon, so it's wise to give up a hopeless conflict before it reaches that level. Of course, what qualifies as a "hopeless conflict" can vary from turn to turn as you draw new cards and have to new options to weigh, particularly as many of the character, booster and support cards have their own rules text to change up the basic game.
Considering this last, it's amazing that the various decks are balanced as well as they are, a state of affairs I'll credit to Knizia's PhD in Mathematics. What's more, each deck has a significantly different feel, from the basic game's Hoax and Vulca representing a relatively straightforward "Boost myself/Fuck you over" dichotomy to the birdlike Flit's incredibly irritating reusable cards, to the amazonian Mimix and Oompa-Loompa-esque Khind's ability to twin up and form gangs respectively, which look similar on paper but which play completely differently, to the Pillar's giant fuck-off caterpillars that eat cards from the opponent's hand. It's the kind of balanced equality you'd expect from an extremely well-made fighting game, and like those, it takes a fair bit of practice to really use your favoured ass-kickers to their greatest effect.
But wait, say you, the reading audience - isn't the game extremely out of print? How can you have significant experience with even one deck, much less the encyclopedic knowledge that you claim? Well, one of those wonderful Internet obsessives has taken it upon himself to create an AI simulator for the entire game. While it does kind of get up my pantleg that it always loads with you as the Hoax fighting the Vulca, that's a minor complaint - It looks good, it plays well, and all the interface questions I've had thus far are covered by the accompanying FAQ. Fair warning: the AI is very, very good - Download the rules and rely heavily on the Assist menu option until you get into the rhythm of the game, or you'll get your ass handed to you early and often.
Blue Moon was created by Reiner Knizia, who I can't mentally name without adding an apostrophe like Flapjack's Captain K'nuckles. K'nizia is the Frank Zappa of game design, which is to say, ridiculously prolific - in an industry where every gamer wants to be a designer, he has over 500 published games - and massively influential - He's pretty much the face of the German school of game design, and his games reflect that school's obsession with simple rules and complex strategy.
Blue Moon's an excellent example of both. The game is played with 30-card decks representing various crazy fantasy races (mercifully none of the Tolkien assortment pack - I'll take bright red golem/natives and caterpillar people over orks'n'elves any day) trying to win fights and thus seduce the three fickle dragons that rule their world. To do this, you play a character card, declare whether the ensuing fight is to be fought based on the Fire or Earth stats and draw new cards. Your opponent plays another character (or combination of a character and a support or booster card - Boosters only affect a particular character, supports affect all the characters you play that fight) to equal or exceed your value in the chosen element. If they do, you have to play a new character and support cards to equal or exceed them. This back-and-forth continues until one player can't or won't equal the current active total, whereupon they admit defeat, the other side moves one or more dragons to their side (or from the loser's side to neutral), all the cards in play are discarded, and the loser starts a new fight. This continues until one player has all three dragons and would win another, or until one player runs out of cards, in which case the player with any dragons (or, failing that, any cards) wins.
There's some interesting conflict and tough choices to be had just using this simple arrangement. If you have a character with a mediocre Earth and strong Fire, do you play it to continue the current Earth-based fight, or retreat and save it for later? Do you keep the level of the fight relatively low, allowing both you and your opponent to toss out small fry characters and wear each other down, or do you escalate and hope to overcome on sheer shock and awe (particularly worrisome if you don't have the resources to keep the escalated fight going another round)? Another point to add to this hand-wringing: If the winner has played six or more cards, they attract an extra dragon, so it's wise to give up a hopeless conflict before it reaches that level. Of course, what qualifies as a "hopeless conflict" can vary from turn to turn as you draw new cards and have to new options to weigh, particularly as many of the character, booster and support cards have their own rules text to change up the basic game.
Considering this last, it's amazing that the various decks are balanced as well as they are, a state of affairs I'll credit to Knizia's PhD in Mathematics. What's more, each deck has a significantly different feel, from the basic game's Hoax and Vulca representing a relatively straightforward "Boost myself/Fuck you over" dichotomy to the birdlike Flit's incredibly irritating reusable cards, to the amazonian Mimix and Oompa-Loompa-esque Khind's ability to twin up and form gangs respectively, which look similar on paper but which play completely differently, to the Pillar's giant fuck-off caterpillars that eat cards from the opponent's hand. It's the kind of balanced equality you'd expect from an extremely well-made fighting game, and like those, it takes a fair bit of practice to really use your favoured ass-kickers to their greatest effect.
But wait, say you, the reading audience - isn't the game extremely out of print? How can you have significant experience with even one deck, much less the encyclopedic knowledge that you claim? Well, one of those wonderful Internet obsessives has taken it upon himself to create an AI simulator for the entire game. While it does kind of get up my pantleg that it always loads with you as the Hoax fighting the Vulca, that's a minor complaint - It looks good, it plays well, and all the interface questions I've had thus far are covered by the accompanying FAQ. Fair warning: the AI is very, very good - Download the rules and rely heavily on the Assist menu option until you get into the rhythm of the game, or you'll get your ass handed to you early and often.
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